Topicalities for the years 2008-2009
  news on the Shikanda portal : Wim van Binsbergen's recent publications and work in progress

1. Intro

This series (established February 2002; on this page only current topicalities from the year 2008- are included; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2010-2011; and here for the years 2012-2013 ) is to alert the visitor of new additions and changes in the Shikanda portal, and reports on recent and forthcoming developments in Wim van Binsbergen's professional activities inthe fields of African Studies, Intercultural Philosophy, Long-Range Cultural Analysis, and Poetry. Hyperlinks give access to the texts in question, and photographs accompany the entries. The information appears in tabulated form. The closer to the top of this page, the more recent an event is. Some events have a page of their own, accessible via a hyperlink; others are merely summarised below, and may then have a simple illustration to mark them.

2. Other sites in the Shakanda portal

if you are through with the topical information below, proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work  
    contact information Wim van Binsbergen
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4. Shikanda Forum and Message Board

The many issues touched upon in Wim van Binsbergen's research and publications often invite specific comments and queries from site visitors. Often such exchanges have a more than personal relevance, and often others would like to join in. This is now possible with the new Shikanda Forum and Message Board. Free Message Forum from Bravenet.com

 

 

5. Topicalities: Wim van Binsbergen's recent publications and work in progress

on this page only current topicalities from the year 2008-2009 are included; the series was initiated in 2002; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years from 2010-

NB: the default language in this webpage is English; however, the site owner lives and works in the Netherlands, and writes poetry in Dutch; entries reflecting an entirely national Dutch context will be in Dutch, and will be marked by an orange background; major entries will be separated by a light green beam:

date topic, links

details, background illustrations etc.

current year: 2010 (would have begun above this line); click here for Current topicalities 2010-
December 2009-March 2010

Archaic cosmology: Rain and its Adversary, the Rainbow

February 2010: publication of
van Binsbergen, Wim, 2010, 'Short note on Kings as “tears of the Rain” and Mankind as “tears of the Sun”: Excerpt of “The case of kings as Tears of Rain (Nkoya, Zambia) / humankind as Tears of Re' (Ancient Egypt)”, i-Medjat: Papyrus 'electronique des Ankhou: Revue caribéenne pluridisciplinaire éditée par l’Unité de Recherche-Action Guadeloupe (UNIRAG), 4, février 2010: p. 7 (click for PDF)

The eye of Horus

The five-tiered ethico-linguistic system of
the Bronze-Age Mediterranean, arguably
including a proto-Bantu / Khoisan substrate

Stealing the moon by building Kapesh kamunungampanda, 'The Kapesh tower from forked branches', in a major Nkoya
myth of kingship, Zambia

In February 2010, Wim van Binsbergen will be 63 years old. It is time to begin to wind up the research projects in which -- with the constant support of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and with great inspiration from the Netherlands Institute for Advances Studies, the Philosophical Faculty Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Harvard Round Table on Comparative Mythology -- he has engaged for the past twenty years: ever since his unsettling transcultural experiences during anthropological fieldwork inFrancistown, Botswana, brought him to radically reconsider standard forms of North-South knowledge construction in anthropology and oral history, and to engage in transcontinental explorations aimed at ascertaining the pre- and proto-historical continuities between Africa and other continents -- ultimately in a bid to establish the empirical foundations for the thesis of the fundamental unity of humankind. Around the turn of 2010 Wim van Binsbergen has been working on the finalisation of a number of books and articles that are scheduled for publication in the course of that year, notably:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., ‘The continued relevance of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena thesis: Yes and No’

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., ‘Before the Pre-Socratics: The evidence of a common elemental transformational cycle underlying Asian, African and European cosmologies since Neolithic times’

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., ‘The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: As seen from the perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa’, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Venbrux, Eric, eds., New Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Cluster analysis assessing the relation between the Eurasian, American, African and Oceanian linguistic macro-phyla: On the basis of the distribution of the proposed *Borean derivates in their respective lexicons: With a lemma exploring *Borean reflexes in Guthrie’s Proto-Bantu

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Towards the Pelasgian hypothesis: An integrative perspective on long-range ethnic, cultural, linguistic and genetic affinities encompassing Africa, Europe, and Asia

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Out of Africa or out of Sundaland: Mythical discourse in global perspective

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Joseph Karst: Pioneering long-range approaches to Mediterranean Bronze Age ethnicity

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 'Reconsidering spiked wheel traps: An exercise in global cultural distribution analysis'

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 'Towards the prehistory of African divination'

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., ‘Building with skulls, and stealing the moon: Aspects of the continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: As seen from the perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa’, in: Venbrux, Eric, & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., eds., Studies in Comparative Mythology

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Venbrux, Eric, eds., New Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology

Venbrux, Eric, & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., eds., Studies in Comparative Mythology

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Woudhuizen, Fred, Ethnicity in Mediterranean proto-history

draft versions of many of these texts have already been made available from this website; specific hyperlinks to these earlier versions will soon be provided, while their imminent publication is pending

Dendrogram of the proposed relationships between
linguistic macrophyla under Starostin's *Borean
hypothesis, including the likely place of Bantu
and Khoisan, with various alternative time scales

A schematic transformative cycle of elements,
such as arguably underlies the Taoist
cosmology, the Nkoya clan system in South
Central Africa, and the pre-Socratic / Aristotelian four-element system

In Wim van Binsbergen's most recent work, a central role is played by his Pelasgian Hypothesis as the culmination of his transcontinental research, over the past 20 years, into geomantic divination, mankala games, leopard-skin symbolism, comparative mythology, language macrophyla, the spiked wheel trap, and other formal systems demonstrably linking Africa and the other two continents of the Old World -- against the background of the increasingly detailed and convincing long-range insights molecular genetics, comparative and historical linguistics, and comparative mythology, are offering into the past of Anatomically Modern Humans, especially from the Upper Palaeolithic onwards. Wim van Binsbergen's imminent publications scheduled for 2010 are intended to present most of this work in progress. Here the Pelasgian Hypothesis will appear as a viable alternative, not only for Stephen Oppenheimer's intriguing and perceptive Sunda thesis, but especially for Martin Bernal's Black Athena thesis. The Pelasgian Hypotheis lacks the reductionist (albeit refreshingly antihegemonic and anti-Eurocentric) Egyptocentrism or Afrocentrism of Bernal's work, and instead highlights the exceptional continuity and creativity of the Mediterranean-centred Pelasgian Realm -- as a major seedbed even of African languages and cultures; in the process, much new light is cast upon one of the most formative periods of global proto-history: the Sea Peoples Episode at the end of the Bronze Age.

 
November 2009 In this period Wim van Binsbergen revised his 2008 Ravenstein paper, and in the process drafted a full-length book MS on The transcontinental continuity of Old World mythologies: As seen from the perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa
In this period Wim van Binsbergen worked with his fellow-convenor Eric Venbrux, and with Kirsten Seifikar as copy editor, on the publication of the 2nd Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, the Netherlands, 2008; the full Proceedings are to be published in the first months of 2010; an edited book containing a selection of the conference papers is to come out later in 2010.
Wim van Binsbergen acted as External Examiner for the Department of Anthropology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, in regard of a PhD thesis on the ecstatic cults of aquatic divinities in Southern Africa

the Ezelsjagpoort 'mermaid' panel after Dowson 1988

October 2009

listening to a foetus' heart tones in modern health care in Liberia; source: http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol21no4/214-maternal-health.html

At the invitation of the Utrecht Student Association for International Relations (Utrechtse Studentenvereniging voor Internationale Betrekkingen. SIB-Utrecht).Wim van Binsbergen will give a lecture entitled 'Contrasting modern western health care and African traditional health care',

place: Spanish Cultural Centre, Domplein 3, Utrecht, the Netherlands
time: Tuesday 27 October 2009, 19:30 hrs

klik hier voor de PowerPoint presentatie van de voordracht:
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, 'Traditionele Afrikaanse gezondheidszorg en Westerse gezondheidszorg: Overeenkomsten en verschillen', lezing SIB-Utrecht, 27 oktober 2009


The surgery of traditional doctor
Mr Smarts Gumede, one of Wim van
Binsbergen's principal teachers of traditional medicine in Botswana


as part of the www.shikanda.net portal, two new web pages were initiated:
NEW Geomancy in Africa and world-wide: Comparative studies in history, anthropology and intercultural philosophy (webpage under construction), and
NEW Nederlandstalige wetenschappelijke en spirituele teksten van Wim van Binsbergen (webpage under construction, in Dutch)

Wednesday 14 October 2009: Wim van Binsbergen is one of the speakers (along with M. Michon, F. van Olden, and E. van Ommering) at an introductory meeting on anthropology as a career perspective, at the department of anthropology, Free University, Amsterdam (where Wim van Binsbergen was Professor of Ethnic Studies 1990-1998); room 6A04, 13:30 - 15:15.

In de serie 'Deuren naar de Andere Wereld' wordt Wim van Binsbergen op 11 oktober geinterviewd door voodoopriesteres en dichteres Maria van Daalen.
Theater de Roestbak
Markt 1
Almere Haven
Aanvang 15.00 uur Toegang gratis
Zie ook: www.corrosia.nl; informatie en reservering op telefoonnummer: (036) 521 56 48 en via reserveren@corrosia.nl

picture source: http://blogsimages.skynet.be

in this month the following book was published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, Expressions of traditional wisdom from Africa and beyond: An exploration in intercultural epistemology, Brussels: Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences / Academie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-mer, Classes des Sciences morales et politiques, Mémoire in-8º, Nouvelle Série, Tome 53, fasc. 4, 68 pp. (click for full-text PDF)
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS. — Epistemology; Tradition; Phronesis; Africa; Intercultural.
Wisdom is initially defined (cf. Aristotle) as creative practical knowledge that allows one to negotiate the contradictions of human life (especially in less rulegoverned domains manifesting uncertainty and incompatible multiple truths), thus accepting that human life is social and finite. After indicating (1) the resilience of wisdom as a topic in modern thought and science, an overview follows on wisdom in various periods and regions of the world (2). (3) The dilemma of expression of wisdom: while scholarship thrives on specialist explicit language use, wisdom is often secret and risks being destroyed by expression and translation. Section (4) offsets expressions of traditional wisdom against four modes of 'tacit modern unwisdom' (in such fields as corporality, conflict regulation, the concept of mind, and myth). (5) Can wisdom be transmitted interculturally, within and outside an academic context, and by what mechanism of situational oppositional framing is traditional wisdom both an alterized object of study and a site of identification and encounter? (6) Defining the specific difference between scientific and wisdom modes of knowing, in the former's reliance on standard, repetitive, intersubjective procedures of knowledge formation embedded in limiting conditions. (7) The four modes of tacit modern unwisdom (cf. 4) are then contrasted with African perspectives. (8) Finally, intercultural philosophy is argued to spring from a situation (today's globalization) where Western mainstream philosophy has to give way to a wisdom perspective as defined above.
September 2009 Now published: van Binsbergen, Wim, and Eric Venbrux, 2009, ‘Comparative Mythology: A Conference Report (Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM), Ravenstein, the Netherlands, August 19-21.2008’, Anthropos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Völker- und Sprachenkunde / International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics / Revue Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Linguistique, 104: 561-564 (click for PDF)
August 2009 Launching a new series: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy -- Transcontinental Comparative Studies

read this new series launching statement -- click here

June-July 2009
During this period Martin Doornbos & Wim van Binsbergen further finalised their book manuscript
Researching Power and Identity in African State Formation
   
During this period Wim van Binsbergen completed the draft of a new book manuscript:

Towards the Extended Pelasgian Hypothesis
An integrative perspective on ethnic, cultural, linguistic and genetic affinities encompassing Africa, Europe, and Asia from the Neolithic onwards

in which much of his transcontinental research of the last fifteen years reaches a conclusive and integrated statement, with major implications for the place of Africa in global cultural history, the Black Athena debate, the interpretation of the ethnicity of the Sea Peoples (Late Bronze Age Mediterranean), and the historical appreciation of the Pre-Socratics which are commonly considered the beginning of Western philosophy.

click here for an outline of this book

click here for a summary of the background of this book within Wim van Binsbergen's ongoing research work

Pardivesture is the ritual wearing of leopard skins. These skins have complex connotations of granulation / speckledness, rain, dispersion, the star-spangled sky, night, evil, femininity, subaltern status. They are symbolically juxtaposed to lion skins, which are light and evenly coloured and have the opposite connotations of daylight, sun, good, male, etc. Pardivesture is one of several dozens of traits that have circulated in the Extended Pelasgian Realm (Maghreb to China) since the Neolithic; that were greatly transformed and augmented during the Bronze Age; and that from the Late Bronze Age onward were dispersed in all directions, west into the Celtic world, North into the Germanic and Uralic world, South into the Bantu-speaking world, and East into the Eurasian Steppe, South Asia, East Asia (China, and especially Altaic Korea and Japan), and ultimately into South East Asia, even Oceania. Towards the Extended Pelasgian Hypothesis offers a detailed empirical analysis of the distribution of these traits, against a linguistic and genetic background, thus proposing the integrative perspective that goes a connsiderable way towards explaining the amazing cultural continuities throughout the Old World
  King Kubama II Kahare of the Nkoya people, Zambia, 1994

The Greek god Dionysus depicted on a Hellenistic mosaic in Delos, Aegean Sea, Greece, 3rd c. BCE The legendary emperor / culture hero / creation god / flood hero Fu Xi in a 13th c. CE depiction
pardivesture in Çatal Hüyük, pre-pottery Neolithic, Anatolia, Turkey pardivesture in Tassili n'Ajjer, fertile Neolithic Sahara
   
As a methodological and empirical exercise towards his new book Towards the Extended Pelasgian Hypothesis, during this period Wim van Binsbergen finished an extensive article 'Reconsidering spiked wheel traps: An exercise in global cultural distribution analysis', now practically ready for publication.

A spiked wheel trap from the Acholi people, Southern Sudan (courtesy Pitt-Rivers Museum, UK)

May 2009
CLICK HERE for an extensively annotated photo essay of this event

(to return to the present page from photographs: press the BACK button of your browser)

 

Coyote, as 'divine trickster', is the protagonist in many North American Flood stories, whose structure often displays the logic of the widespread transformative cycle of elements


Mwene (Queen) Shakalongo, a clan chief of the Nkoya people of Zambia recently reinstated after nearly a century of being denied by the state, here depicted at the Kazanga annual festival in the early 2000s, Kaoma district, Zambia


geese representing the Hermopolitan Ogdoad, and Thoth, Ancient Egypt (courtesy
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/images/ogdoad.jpg )

On a fresco in the Capella Nuova, Orvieto, Italy (c. 1500), Empedocles leans out of the void and inspects his four-divided universe

Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009

Hosted by the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM)

Co-hosted by the Intercollege Project for Education about Religions and Cultures (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research)

Sponsored by Harvard University, Cambridge (Mass.), USA

Supported by the Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

Under the editorship of Eric Venbrux and Wim van Binsbergen, the convenors of the 2008 2nd Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (Ravenstein, the Netherlands, August 2008) work is in progress on the publications of the integral Proceedings, and of a selective and high-profile book Studies in Comparative Mythology.

Meanwhile, at the Third Annual Meeting (this year in Tokyo) Wim van Binsbergen, in his capacity as one of the Directors of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, hopes to present the following paper:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009,

'Izanami giving birth to Kagutsuchi / Fire:
Evidence for a widespread proto-historic cosmology revolving on an elemental transformative cycle, in Japan, Africa, through-out the Old World, and in the New World – as a step in the world-historic development of modes of thought',

paper to be presented at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009
:

click on the above link for the full text of this paper (PDF)

ABSTRACT: Point of departure will be the myth of the primal goddess Izanami giving birth to the Fire God Kagutsuchi, and in the process sustaining such burns that she dies and becomes a, or the, death goddess -- a remarkable development, for at this point she has already given birth to islands, mountains, rivers, trees, etc. without noticeable difficulty. I will outline six different registers whose interplay governs the myth, and of these I will only explore one: that of a transformation cycle of elements. Here, like in Izanami's plight, destruction and production are the two basic relations. This cosmological model surfaces, for instance, in a late, streamlined form in late 1st mill. BCE China: as the yi jing cosmological system of changes based on the 64 combinations of the eight trigrams two taken at a time; and the five-element cosmology of Taoism in general -- but with convincing parallels -- significantly differing in detail -- in sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, India, Ancient Greece -- Empedocles and other Pre-Socratics -- and North America). Fire, of course, is among one of the basic elements or positions, and so are water, earth, air, often also metal and wood. Without wishing to reduce the complexity and literary grandeur of the myth of Izanami giving birth to Kagutsuchi / Fire to just one of the varieties of the transformative cycle of elements, my detailed argument explores what rich insights this perpective yet may offer, both to the study of Japanese mythology (casting some -- hopefully --new light, not only on Izanami and Kagutsuchi / Fire, but also on Izanagi, and on the nature of their narrative), and to the historical study of human modes of thought worldwide.

CLICK HERE FOR THE JAPANESE ABSTRACT


This trip will be financed by the
Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge Ma, USA


An Illustration of Searching the Seas with the Tenkei (Tenkei o motte sokai o saguru no zu). Painting by Eitaku Kobayashi (Meiji period). Izanagi to the right, Izanami to the left.
April 2009
Trip to Cameroon (2-18 April 2009):

During the first three weeks of April, 2009, Wim van Binsbergen hopes to be in Cameroon, in order to supervise his various Ph.D students there in intensive face-to-face sessions, and in order to visit an International Colloquiumt:

UNIVERSITE PROTESTANTE PROTESTANT UNIVERSITY
D’AFRIQUE CENTRALE (UPAC) OF CENTRAL AFRICA (PUCA)

B.P. 4011 Yaoundé-Cameroun
Tél. : + (237) 22.21.26.90 Fax : + (237) 22.20.53.24
Site: http// www.upac-edu.org E-mail : rectorat@upac-edu.org
Faculté des Sciences Sociales et des Relations Internationale

International Colloquium on The Problematic of Peace and Development in Africa: Balance Sheet and New Stakes in the 3rd Millennium (convenor Jr. Prof. Célestin Tagou), Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations, Protestant University of Central Africa, Yaounde, Republic of Cameroon, 6-9 April 2009
PLACE: YAOUNDE – CAMEROON (convenor: Dr Celestin Tagou; click here for the Conference's Call for Papers)

This International Colloquium, splendidly organisated by the convenor with the able assistance of Mrs Constance Makia, marked the founding, at Yaounde, Cameroon, of the African Institute for Peace Communication and Development (AIPCD; director: Jr. Prof. Celestin Tagou, of the UPAC Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations), in close association with the radical peace activist Johan Galtung and his organisation Transcend International: A Network for Peace and Development. Johan Galtung himself, still going strong at 79, was the guest of honour during the conference; he delivered an interesting keynote address setting out his well-known applied theory of peace-making, and during the closing ceremony, after a passionate and impressive further address, signed the contract between te AIPCD and Transcend.

To this Colloquium (notably to Panel 1: Historical and theoretical approaches to the Problem of Peace and Development in General), Wim van Binsbergen contributed a paper entitled:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, 'On the dynamics of conflict, reconciliation and peace in African societies – from the local to the national level, and beyond' .

This paper has now been greatly revised for the proceedings of the Colloquim, resulting in the following text:

Abstract. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press (2010), 'Africa’s splendid social technology of reconciliation, and the political sociology of its under-utilisation at the national and international level', in: Tagou, C., ed., The Problematic of Peace and Development in Africa: Balance Sheet and New Stakes in the 3rd Millennium [ provisional title ]. (click for PDF) The argument consists of two parts. In the first part, I address the question as to the nature of reconciliation – reconciliation being a ‘social technology’ i.e. a set of established and viable strategies of problem-solving, consisting however not in the manipulation of the natural, non-human aspects of the world but in the articulation and transformative management of human individuals and groups. Such social technologies of reconciliation i.e. of social and political conflict resolution, I will examine especially in the African context, and I will conclude that, among the societies of the world, African societies have, since times immemorial, particularly excelled in the social technology of reconciliation as applied at the local and regional level. This leads on to the second part, in which I contrast Africa’s excellent record in local and regional reconciliation, with the excessive rate of destructive and genocidal conflict that has characterised the African continent in the past few decades. The argument’s central question then becomes: How can we explain that Africa’s social technologies of reconciliation have proven so utterly ineffective, and have so little been applied, at the national and the international level? After highlighting the crisis of legitimacy of modern and traditional elites as part of the explanation, a fuller explanation is derived from an examination of the political sociology of modern Africa, along such lines as the weak nature of Africa’s formal organisations; the pitfall of particularist divisiveness; failing idioms of universalism; and the dislocated and alienated African subject. This leads us to consider Christianity and ubuntu (‘the art of being human’) in South African reconciliation, and to recognise transcendentalism and universalism as harbingers of peace – but at a considerable cultural cost for Africa. Greater attention to the time-honoured African social technology of reconciliation may help to reduce that cost.

the paper contains an extensive bibliography. Its footnotes moreover reflect recent developments in the author's research on transcontinental continuities, long-range cultural comparison, Afrocentricity, the different conception of history in Islam and Christianity, and the econological causes of Africa's failure to sustain viable formal organisations including the state (with detrimental consequences for peace in the continent)


Having earlier visited the Universities of Yaounde I, and the Catholic University of Central Africa at Yaounde, in previous years (click for details: the years
2005 and 2006), I was pleasantly surprised when making this first acquaintance with the Protestant University of Central Africa (UPAC). This institution had only very recently been upgraded from a Theological College to a University. The modest premises at the top of one of the hills on which Yaounde was built, turned out to contain a well-stocked library, complemented by a well-trained and deeply committed faculty staff of international orientation, and a most enthousiastic student population. The students keenly participated in the Colloquium discussions and moreover were active as choir singers, hostesses, and as traditional dancers treating the delegates to an evening of entertainment in which full justice was done to time-honoured African musical traditions. Contrary to the suggestion I make in my paper, here Christianity as an idiom of universalism and transcendence proved to be rather compatible with a celebration of the African historic heritage, even though the latter's forms were inevitably streamlined and globalised.

After the conference I was approached by the UPAC Theological Faculty whether I would accept the chair of Islamology on a part-time basis, especially with a view of directing current and new PhD projects on Islam-Christian relations, for which Cameroon itself provides an interesting field of study. The study of Islam is
one of my original fields of training and has remained a focus of my research through the decades. Also I supervised relevant research in Cameroon. Against the background of my admiration for UPAC, I welcomed the offer as a basis for further negotiation. Details are currently being worked out.

To introduce myself to the prospective undergraduate students, I already gave an extensive lecture:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, 'Introduction a l'Islam: Origines, doctrines, pratiques, accommodations culturelles et enjeux politiques en Afrique moderne' , lecture, Faculty of Theology, Catholic University of Central Africa, 16 April 2009, 9.00-11.15 hrs













This trip was financed by the German Cooperation for Development, via the EED (Evangelische Entwicklungsdienst); the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and the African Studies Centre, Leiden. A further logistic contribution was made by the Belgian FWO (National Foundation for Scientific Research), whose semi-annual meeting of the C4 (Theology and Religious Sciences) section, at Brussels, followed a few days after my return flight from Cameroon.

Supervising the Cameroonian PhDs during an earlier trip made in 2005. In the meantime their respective projects have made much progress, which was further enhanced by the intensive and detailed supervision sessions during the present trip.
The thesis on ethnic passing and conversion to Islam in the Maroua area, Northern Cameroon, on which Kees Schilder took his PhD at Leiden University, 1994, and which was supervised by myself and Prof. Peter Geschiere

'Family photo' of the conveners, delegates and host of the International Colloquium on The Problematic of Peace and Development in Africa: Balance Sheet and New Stakes in the 3rd Millennium (convenor Jr. Prof. Célestin Tagou), Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations, Protestant University of Central Africa, Yaounde, Republic of Cameroon, 6-9 April 2009; in the centre, in light blue shirt, Johan Galtung
Johan Galtung in conversation with Wim van Binsbergen at the 2009 Colloquium, UPAC, Yaounde Jr. Prof. Celestin Tagou, able and inspiring convenor of the Colloquium, and Director of the African Institute for Peace Communication and Development (AIPCD). Dr Tagou has a PhD from Hamburg, Germany, and one of the pleasant surprises of this Colloquium was the presence of his two Doktorvaeter, his sometime supervisors, smugly perceiving that their spiritual son was doing fine, and adding their own considerable prestige and expertise to the meeting
UPAC faculty member Rev. Prof. Dr Marcel Oyono, historian and theologian, holds two doctoral degrees from Memphis, USA. I left UPAC with copies of his two doctoral theses, hoping to find a publisher for them in the North Atlantic:

Oyono, Marcel Ngbwa, 2000, 'The contribution of the Fon cultural tradition to the understanding of the gospel in Cameroon, West Africa', Doctor of Ministry thesis, Memphis Theological Seminary, Memphis TN, USA.

Oyono, Marcel Ngbwa, 2004, ‘Colonization and Ethnic Rivalries in Cameroon Since 1884’, PhD thesis in history, The University of Memphis

Interested publishers are welcome to open the above hyperlinks and inspect the copy; for further details
please contact me by e-mail
UPAC PhD and colloquium panelist Rev.Prof.Dr. Abekyamwale Ebuela Abi with a librarian at the UPAC library. Also this colleague's PhD thesis was entrusted to me in order to find a publisher:

Abekyamwale Ebuela Abi, 2007, 'La theologie de la reconciliation dans le contexte congolais d'apres-guerre : Une contribution pour la construction de la paix et le developpement', thèse de doctorat en théologie, Université Protestante de l' Afrique Centrale, Yaounde, Cameroun.

Interested publishers are welcome to open the above hyperlink and inspect the copy; for further details please contact me by e-mail
The UPAC Library
The UPAC campus
UPAC students entertain Colloquium delegates with a splendid evening of tradional dances from all over Africa
Prof. Fabius Okumu-Aiya from Gulu University, Uganda, delivers his paper on the peace process in his part of Africa
For the past two years, one of my PhD students in Cameroon, Mr. Pascal Touoyem, has lectured on my version of Intercultural Philosophy at the University Yaounde I, where I had lectured myself in 2005 and 2006. During the present visit I was proudly presented with an avalanche of high-quality student work on various aspects of my recent research and of my 'magnum opus' Intercultural Encounters (2003)
The Cameroonian PhDs in 2009
Mendong, here showing its patches of horticulture between the pleasant apartment buildings inhabited by civil servants, is where another of my PhD students lives, Mr Pius Mosima. His apartment had the honour of accommodating, on the eve of Easter 2009, the Bakwerri Cultural Association (from the Buea area, West Cameroon) on an annual traditional memorial rite for the recently deceased. As a student of African ritual of many years standing, I was privileged to be able to attend this meaningful rite combining respect for the dead with the vibrations and the sustenance of life
Uniformed members of the Bakwerri Cultural Association's Executive dish out the food that is an indispensible part of the memorial rite
While the Executive mainly occupies the drawing room inside the apartment building, a few dozen other members have convened in the public open space in front of the building, where a party tent is erected, food is being served, and drumming, singing and occasional dancing pays hommage to the recently deceased
closing the circle: dressed in Cameroonian ensembles made to measure after the UPAC student's hostess uniforms, my two youngest daughters highlight the complementarity between continents



January-March 2009
This ironically anachronistic image of a Greek vase (displaying modern geographical knowledge and representation), with a sunburst highlight on Egypt and the Ancient Near East, appears as the emblem of Wim van Binsbergen's webpage on Black Athena and Afrocentricity

Martin Bernal (*1937), Cambridge (UK) trained Sinologist / historian of ideas, Professor of Politics and since the late 1980s also Associate Professor of NearEastern Studies, Cornell University, USA; and visionary initator of the Black Athena debate

Further work on the Black Athena debate

1987 the Sinologist and historian of ideas Martin Bernal published the splendid first volume of his Black Athena series, in which he seeks to identify 'the Afroasiatic roots' of classical Greek civilisation and hence of European and North Atlantic civilisation -- criticising the 'fabrication', in the 18th and 19th c. CE, of Ancient Greece as a completely original, incomparably rich culture without historical antecedents or indebtedness to other cultures especially those of the Ancient Near East including Egypt. An intense world-wide debate followed, to which Wim van Binsbergen has made several contributions since 1996 (see his specific webpage devoted to Black Athena and Afrocentricity), including an acclaimed collection Black Athena Ten Years After, now to be reprinted by LIT Verlag (Berlin / Boston / Munster) in much updated and augmented form as Black Athena Twenty Years After. That the Black Athena debate is still alive and kicking, is demonstrated by the major international conference on the topic in Warwick (U.K.) early November 2008, in which prominent scholars participated in a bid to assess the lasting significance of Bernal's view, if any. Meanwhile Wim van Binsbergen's constructively critical reflection on Bernal's work has continued. A recent and up-to-date product is the following article now submitted for publication:

The continued relevance of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena thesis: Yes and No

(33 pp., with one table and two figures, and extensive bibliographic references)

ABSTRACT. This paper situates Martin Bernal’s work in context and largely defends it against the sweeping criticism and allegations brought against it (notably in Lefkowitz and MacLean Rogers’ 1996 collection Black Athena revisited; and in Berlinerblau’s Heresy in the University, for whom Bernal is 'the academic Elvis' -- i.e. the appropriating White recycling Black ideas). Even so, serious criticism cannot be avoided, notably of Bernal's lack of method; his politicised view of historical and academic truth; his tendency to conflate culture, language and somatic type; his obsession with origins; his literalist approach to myth; his inability to make living socio-cultural history out of reconstructions of provenance; and his dogged insistence on an unconvincing, for non-systematic, Ancient Egyptian etymology of the Greek theonym Athena. Without downright destroying the Black Athena thesis, these various defects could be remedied by the concerted, interdisciplinary collaboration of specialists, to which the argument exhorts the international scholarly community. However, towards the end the argument cannot refrain from more fundamental criticism, chiding Bernal for myopic concentration on the Eastern Mediterranean. Here the argument goes beyond the Black Athena thesis in the light of state-of-the-art comparative and historical linguistics, and molecular genetics, which have made possible a truly long-range approach to global cultural history. In passing, we highlight the peculiar Bronze Age Mediterranean presence of Niger-Congo / Bantu linguistic elements (usually associated with sub-Saharan Africa). Relying on the recently discovered ‘Back-into-Africa’ migration from Central and West Asia from the Upper Palaeolithic times onward, and on recent reconstructions of the Upper Palaeolithic *Borean parent language, the present argument offers a powerful alternative for the Black Athena thesis: The Aegean region looks similar to Ancient Egypt, not primarily because of diffusion from Egypt in the Late Bronze Age, but because both were the recipients of a demic, linguistic and cultural movement from West (ultimately Central) Asia; and this movement also extended to sub-Saharan Africa, producing the same similarities there. Ancient Egypt displays many cultural and religious similarities with sub-Saharan Africa, not primarily because of diffusion from sub-Saharan Africa to Egypt in Neolithic times, but the other way around: because the Back-into-Africa movement, carrying a significant share of Asian genes, as well as cultural, religious and linguistic elements (including *Borean-associated elements towards Niger-Congo / Bantu) passed via Egypt on its way from Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. However, while thus the argument has rather devastating implications for Afrocentrism including the Bernallian variant, it could not have been made without Bernal's visionary and path-breaking contribution.
In this period Wim van Binsbergen works on the editing of a number of book manuscript hoped to go to the press in 2009

Article on myth, philosophy, poetics, and long-range research in Religion Compass

In a special issue devoted to the theme of 'Myth and the Disciplines' (eds. Mineke Schipper & Daniela Merolla), the journal Religion Compass finally brought out, on the basis of the Leiden 2003 conference of the same name:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, 'Rupture and Fusion in the Approach to Myth: Situating Myth Analysis Between Philosophy, Poetics and Long-Range Historical Reconstruction', Religion Compass, 3 (2009): 1-34 (click for full-text PDF)

ABSTRACT: On the basis of my engagement with myth over the decades, the present paper seeks to present some ‘prolegomena’ to the study of myth today. It does so, in the first place, by a short overview of philosophical contributions and implications of the study of myth. After formulating and discussing a possible definition of myth, the argument focuses on two complementary perspectives in the scholarly approach to myth: the objectifying perspective of rupture versus the participatory and identifying perspective of fusion. After indicating the pros and cons of both, and giving an example (notably, the ‘hero fights monster’ mytheme) of extensive continuity in myth through space and time, the paper concludes with a summary of the main results of the author’s current long-range comparative research into leopard and leopard-skin symbolism, which is informed by loosely interlocking mythical complexes extending all across the Old World and part of the New World, over a time span from the Upper Palaeolithic to the present.

Illustration: Apollo kills Python. Engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid's Metamorphoses Book I, 435-451. Fol. 9r, image 12, 1581; One of the perennial themes of global mythology is the 'combat myth', and its permutations and variations in several continents and periods (as studied by Fontenrose, Python, 1980, 2nd ed.) are used in the paper's argument to demonstrate the continuity and interconnectivity of myths in space and time

current year: 2009 (begins above this line; the closer to the top of the page, the nearer to 2009)
October-December 2008
Three new annual volumes of Quest published, bringing the journal up-to-date

After some setbacks, by the end of 2008 we have finally been able to bring out as many as three new annual volumes of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie: notably the annual volumes 2006 (vol. XX, 205 pp.), as well as 2007 (vol. XXI, 331 pp.) and 2008 (XXII, 260 pp.). This brings the journal up to date again.  

Sanya Osha (with the assistance of Wim van Binsbergen) edited a timely and fascinating special issue on African feminisms (vol. XX – 2006, 205 pp.) with a team of contributors consisting of some of the most prominent African women intellectuals, and the Nigerian philosopher Eze. Wim van Binsbergen edited a special issue on Lines and rhizomes: The transcontinental element in African philosophies (vol. XXI -- 2007, 331 pp.).

to this volume, Wim van Binsbergen has contributed the following two articles:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, ‘The eclectic scientism of Félix Guattari: Africanist anthropology as both critic and potential beneficiary of his thought’, in: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy/ Revue Africaine de Philosophie, Vol. XXI, No. 1-2, 2007, special issue on: Lines and rhizomes – The transcontinental element in African philosophies, pp. 155-228 (click for PDF which also includes an abstract)

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, ‘Lines and rhizomes: The transcontinental element in African philosophies: Introduction', in: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy/ Revue Africaine de Philosophie, Vol. XXI, No. 1-2, 2007, special issue on: Lines and rhizomes – The transcontinental element in African philosophies, pp. 7-22 (click for PDF which also includes an abstract)

Wim van Binsbergen edited a general volume under the title African philosophy and the negotiation of practical dilemmas of individual and collective life (XXII -- 2008, 260 pp.)

to this volume, Wim van Binsbergen has contributed the following article:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, ‘Traditional wisdom – Its expressions and representations in Africa and beyond: Exploring intercultural epistemology’, in: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy/ Revue Africaine de Philosophie, Vol. XXI, No. 1-2, 2007, issue on: African philosophy and the negotiation of practical dilemmas of individual and collective life, pp. 49-120 (click for PDF which also includes an abstract)

as well as the editorial:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, 'Editorial: African philosophy and the negotiation of practical dilemmas of individual and collective life', Quest: African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, 22, 1-2, pp. 2-4.

As Editor in Chief of Quest, Wim van Binsbergen wishes to thank all of Quest's authors, readers and subscription agents for their patience and continued support of Quest. We look forward to your submissions of papers for publication, and your subscriptions if you prefer the hard copies of our journal (full web access of all twenty-two annual volumes published continues to be free, world-wide); full sets of back copies are available in limited number. A new volume XXIII – 2009 is already on its way but it can use a few more contributions. Volume XXIII will be the last volume that is to have some limited institutional support from the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands. The obvious next step is to find a permanent home for Quest in Africa; the present, then outgoing, Editor will welcome any viable suggestions on this point.
Please note that Quest is now best approached by e-mail via the Editor’s mail address (click).
 
New book drafted: Black Vulcan? Exploring African, Egyptian and global connections of Hephaistos

Having accumulated a large number of outstanding vacation days which could not be taken on to the next year, Wim van Binsbergen was able to have a sabbatical from mid-October to end of December, 2008. In this period he worked on outstanding publications, published three annual volumes of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, and wrote a book-length draft of a new proto-historical study provisionally entitled Black Vulcan? Exploring African, Egyptian and global connections of Hephaistos, whose inspiration came, distantly but unmistakably, from Bernal's Black Athena trilogy (1987-2006), but more directly from Václav Blažek's paper for the 2008 Ravenstein conference (see below, August 2008; Blažek's paper may be consulted at the Ravenstein conference website).

 
 

Published: Wim van Binsbergen's CODESRIA article on existential dilemmas in a Northerner's (René Devisch's) production of relevant Africanist knowledge

In April 2007 the University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, granted an honorary doctorate to the prominent Belgian anthropologist Professor René Devisch (one of that University's alumni) for his immense contributions to Congo studies (also see Devisch's personal website at: https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0012668/ ). For the CODESRIA Bulletin this was reason to organise (in the time-honoured manner of the leading anthropological journal Current Anthropology) a multivocal critical discussion of René Devisch's extensive and wide-ranging speech of thanks; the contributors to this discussion include Mudimbe, Keita, Depelchin, etc. The collection came from the press in November 2008, and is about to be uploaded onto the CODESRIA website. Wim van Binsbergen's contribution to this collection deals with the dilemmas of vicariousness, performativity, identity loss and personal myth in the transcontinental construction of Africanist knowledge:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2008, ‘Existential dilemmas of a North Atlantic anthropologist in the production of relevant Africanist knowledge', CODESRIA Bulletin, 2008, pp. 15-20 (click for PDF).

the same argument was also published in French as:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, ‘Dilemmes existentiels d’un anthropologue du nord de l’Atlantique dans la production de connaissances africanistes appropriées’, Bulletin du CODESRIA, 2008, 1-2, pp. 15-20

In order to limit the paper to manageable length, the CODESRIA Bulletin Editors proposed to omit the extensive bibliographical and critical apparatus but to include a link to the present webpage, on which the original, full article can be found: http://www.shikanda.net/devisch.htm (click here for full version). ; regrettably, time has not yet allowed to prepare a similarly full, French version

September 2008
Expert meeting on Kosovo: Ethnicity and national independence

18 september 2008: Wim van Binsbergen participeert, samen met enige politicologen, historici, journalisten, vertegenwoordigers van NGOs, een kunstenaar, en directeur en medewerkers van De Balie: Centrum voor Politiek en Cultuur, in de besloten expert-meeting KOSOVO DOMINO die De Balie te Amsterdam, in samenwerking met Oxfam / NOVIB, houdt ter voorbereiding en toetsing van een geplande reeks bijeenkomsten over de nabije toekomst van grenzen, onafhankelijkheid, en identiteit, niet alleen in de Balkan, maar over de hele wereld, inclusief Afrika

     
Quest website restored

The website of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, which regrettably was inaccessible for some time, has now been restored at the familiar URL http://www.quest-journal.net .

Prof. Hountondji from Benin, prominent African philosopher and member of the Quest advisory board, inspects back copies of Quest at the journal's relaunching, Leiden, Netherlands, April 2004
August 2008
Publication of Braambos, a book of poetry, on the occasion of Matthew Schoffeleers' 80th birthday

DICHTBUNDEL: BRAAMBOS. Op 31 augustus 2008 vierden vrienden en oud-collega's de 80e verjaardag van Matthieu Schoffeleers, priester en oud-missionaris te Malawi, gedurende vele jaren hoogleraar religieuze antropologie aan de Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam en aan de Universiteit Utrecht, en jarenlang de stuwende kracht achter de cultus van de martelaar en vegetatiegod Mbona, wiens heiligdom zich bevindt in de Beneden Shire vallei te Malawi. Het wetenschappelijk en persoonlijk leven van Schoffeleers is op vele wijzen verweven met dat van Wim van Binsbergen: sinds 1973 als vriend en als collega-pionier in de ontwikkeling van een long-range proto-historische benadering van de religie van Zuidelijk Centraal Afrika, als academisch promotor in 1979, als celebrant bij het huwelijk van Wim van Binsbergen en Patricia Saegerman 1984, als mede-redacteur van Wim van Binsbergen & Matthew Schoffeleers, eds., 1985, Theoretical explorations in African religion, Londen / Boston, Kegan Paul International, etc. Het lag dan ook voor de hand dat Wim van Binsbergen in 1998, bij het afscheid van Schoffeleers van de Universiteit van Utrecht, de voornaamste spreker was, met een uitvoerig vertoog waarin uitgaande van het werk van Schoffeleers en met een parallel met van Binsbergens optreden als Zuidelijk Afrikaans geestesmedium, de grenzen van integriteit in antropologisch veldwerk werden verkend, opgenomen in de door Michael Elias en Ria Reis geredigeerde feestbundel Getuigen ondanks zichzelf, en later in het Engels opgenomen in Wim van Binsbergens boek Intercultural encounters (Berlin etc.: LIT, 2003). Voor Schoffeleers' tachtigste verjaardag liet Wim van Binsbergen een nieuwe dichtbundel het licht zien:

Braambos: Een gedicht,

waarvan de integrale tekst en de omslag met flaptekst hier beschikbaar worden gemaakt (PDF).

   
Intensive PhD supervision

In the context of the Ravenstein 2008 conference (see below), one of Wim van Binsbergen's PhD students, Stephanus Djunatan came to the Netherlands for highly intensive supervision. In the process, the West Java specialist, anthropologist Dr Robert Wessing, was found prepared to join the supervisory team, which moreover comprises Prof.Dr Ignatius Bambang Sugiharto, Head of Philosophy, UNPAR University, Bandung, Indonesia, in addition to the intercultural philosopher Wim van Binsbergen. The thesis is to be defended before the Erasmus University Rotterdam, end of 2010.

photograph right: Bandung philosophy lecturer and Erasmus University Rotterdam MA alumnus Stephanus Djunatan (left) and Leiden Drs/MA the photographer Henri Ismael (middle), during fieldwork in the house of the senior shrine warden Pa Undang (right), dessa Rawabogo, Ciwidey, Bandung region, Indonesia, July 2007; click here for details

Mr Djunatan's trip was sponsored by the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam

   
International Association for Comparative Mythology: Second Annual Conference; convenors: Eric Venbrux and Wim van Binsbergen

Wim van Binsbergen presents his paper on 'The continuities of African and Eurasian mythologies'; in the chair Prof. Boris Oguibénine from Strassburg, France
Prof. Matsumura from Tokyo, Japan, presents his paper on the relevance of Japanese mythology for Old World mythology in general
place: Ravenstein (near Nijmegen, the Netherlands)

dates: 19-21 August 2008

for full details including the programme, abstracts, a full sets of papers, discussions, and list of international sponsors (foremost: Harvard University, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, the African Studies Centre Leiden, the Philosophical Faculty Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy), click here to open the special conference website at http://www.iacm.bravehost.com

for a brief conference report, click here (van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, ‘Conference of the International association for Comparative Mythology: 19-21 Augustus 2008, Ravenstein’, Habari [Communication Bulletin, African Studies Centre, Leiden], 22: 19-20) (PDF)

to this conference the site owner contributed the very rough draft (not for publication nor published comment!) of an extensive paper:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2008, 'The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: As seen from the perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa' (click for PDF)

ABSTRACT. Against the background of topical developments ion comparative mythology (especially the work of Michael Witzel), and concentrating on the mythology of the Nkoya people of Zambia (South Central Africa) my argument extensively offers the descriptive data on which to base a formal consideration of Nkoya –Eurasian parallels, gradually proceeding to a point where such formal consid-eration could begin to give way to the admission of factual historical continuity. Thus I argue that there is an empirically justified case for such continuity between African and Eurasian mythologies, as a way to open up new theoretical, historical and interpretative horizons. In the process, a number of possible explanatory models of such continuity are considered and evaluated both empirically and theoretically: Frobenius’ (1931) model of the South Erythraean culture extending from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to East Africa and South West Asia; cultural diffusion from Egypt (the Egyptocentric argument); combined cultural and demic diffusion from sub-Saharan Africa shaping Egyptian and subsequently Greek mythology (the Afrocentrist position, and Bernal’s Afrocentrist afterthought after his Egypto-centrist Black Athena position); van Binsbergen’s Aggregative Diachronic Model of World Mythology, claiming that ‘Pandora’s Box’ (my proposed term for the cultural heritage with which Anatomically Modern Humans left Africa in two sallies, 80 and 60 ka BP) contained a few basic mythological themes that were subsequently developed, transformed and innovation in Asia after which the results where fed back into Africa in the context of the recently discovered Back-into-Africa movement from 15 ka BP; and Oppenheimer’s General Sunda Thesis, claiming a general fertilising effect (implied to have been Austric / Austronesian based) of pre-insular South East Asia upon West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Africa.

Part of this paper's argument specifically addresses parallels between the core image, among the Zambian Nkoya, of kings as the 'Tears of Rain' (cf. Wim van Binsbergen, 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in Central Western Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International), and the Ancient Egyptian conception of humankind as springing from the tears ofc. This section is now being greatly reworked for publication in an Egyptological context.

towards this conference, funds have been made available by: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA; the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences; the Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands; the African Studies Centre, Leiden University, the Netherlands; the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie; the Research School NISCO, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

June-July 2008

The virtualisation of First Peoples art in Western Canada today

Gold and abalone-shell broche by Bill Reid, a radio announcer who gradually became aware of his First Nations background, became a goldsmith, then a monumental sculptor, and ended as the celebrated figurehead of the revival, virtualisation and official appropriation of Haida culture

Typical landscape in the Rocky Mountains

The demiurge, divine trickster and culture hero Raven is one of the most prominent figures in Northwest Coast mythology and iconography... (Raven representation from the Britsh Columbia Museum, Victory)

Yet the standard Canadian icon of Raven has become, inevitably, Bill Reid's monumental 'Raven meets the first humans' (commissioned by, and now on display at, the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

While the preparation for the 2nd Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology continued at full throttle, Wim van Binsbergen took the opportunity to travel, with his wife and two youngest children, to a part of the world on which his research had touched more and more in the last few years: the coastal areas, the interior Plateau, and the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. This region is home of some of the most exciting flood stories in the world, featuring such whimsical divine tricksters / culture heroes as Coyote and Raven, whose earthly counterparts may be encountered at every wilderness campsite. It is moreover the destination of suspected trans-Pacific Sunda influence in the cultures of Haida, Kwakiutl etc. Finally, both culturally and mythologically North America is a part of the world that (in such details as divination systems, games, female puberty rites, myths) has remarkable affinities with sub-Saharan Africa, which Wim van Binsbergen's recent long-range research into comparative mythology tends to explain on the basis of a common partial basis in West to Central Asia, whence the newly discovered 'Back-into-Africa' movement brought genes and cultural patterns into Africa, while much more recognised movements reached from Central Asia across the Bering Street as major contirbutions to the peopling of the Americas. Like an earlier trip to Navaho Nation (1979), but now based on somewhat greater knowledge of the extensive anthropological and linguistic literature, the exploration of 4,000 kms of British Columbia and adjacent Alberta within a few weeks -- with an increasing focus on Native American, or as the euphemistic expression is in Canada, 'First Nations', art, from curio shops to Bill Reid -- particularly highlighted extensive parallels between First Nations' conditions today, and the plight of peasants and proletarians in colonial and post-colonial Africa. In this self-sponsored project, data were collected that are ultimately to lead to an exploratory article on the virtualisation of Native American art and identity in Canado today -- as a specific, and surprisingly illuminating, application of Wim van Binsbergen's earlier work virtuality and globalisation in the contemporary African context. Cf.:

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa, The Hague: WOTRO [ Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research, a division of the Netherlands Research Foundation NWO ] , Working papers on Globalisation and the construction of communal identity, 3;

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2001b, 'Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualised boundary conditions of the kinship order', in: Bond, G.C., & Ciekawy, D.M., eds., Witchcraft dialogues: Anthropological and philosophical exchanges, Athens (OH): Ohio University Press, pp. 212-263

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, 'Globalization and virtuality: Analytical problems posed by the contemporary transformation of African societies', in: Meyer, B., & Geschiere, P., eds., Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.273-303. 

Most totem poles now on display in Canada are only a few decades old, and while conveying time-honoured mythical themes, primarily serve to publicly dissimulate the uneasy relationship between Native Americans and the Canadian government

Canis lactrans, the Coyote, another culture and flood hero of North American cultures

Aerial photograph of the little town of Lytton, at the confluence of the Fraser and the Thompson Rivers. Right at the centre of the Plateau's abundant salmon fishing grounds, Lytton was a centre of salmon processing and trading centre even in pre-conquest times. Still its population is predominantly First Nations (Nlaka'pamux, Interior Salish). The 'Reserve''s territory and headquarters are located in the northwestern outskits of Lytton, where the First Nation operated curio shop provides a depressing but revealing glimps of cultural protest and revival

The Thompson River near Kamloops

prominently displayed in a shrine-like central spot at Vancouver International Airport (another cast embellishes the Canadian Embassy in the USA), Bill Reid's monumental sculpture The Spirit of Haida Gwaii ('Haida Country') has become an icon of the public production and appropriation of First Nation Art Eagle Spirit, an art gallery situated at the trendy Granville Island near the place in Vancouver where Bill Reid had his workshop, eloquently testifies to the commodification and virtualisation of First Nation art The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, here on Canada's $20 bill
May 2008
Conclusive developments in Wim van Binsbergen's divination studies since 1988
In July 2005, Wim van Binsbergen had been honoured (next to the Mozambican ethnomathemathician Gerdes) to pronounce the keynote address at the Leiden international conference on divination (click here for details on the 2004-2005 Topicalities page). Meanwhile two of the convenors, Walter van Beek and Phil Peek, have planned a collective volume based on the conference. On the basis of his comparative and historical long-range research since 1990, in the Spring of 2008 Wim van Binsbergen worked his keynote into an extensive and complex statement on 'Divination in space and time', a selection of which is agreed to be included in the van Beek / Peek volume (the typological and philosophical parts), while the central, long-range historical part on 'The prehistory of African divination' will be published separately. Click on the following link for the entire draft article (PDF; draft: not for publication or published comment):

Wim van Binsbergen, in press, 'African divination across time and space: The typology, intercontinental connections, prehistory, and intercultural epistemology of sub-Saharan mantics'.
ABSTRACT: The argument first dwells on the typology of African divination systems, with special emphasis on the forms and socio-cultural contexts (regionally, intercontinentally, and from a long-range historical perspective) of the Southern African four-tablet system as a major representative of the widespread family of geomantic divination systems. In the process, we will identify some of the most striking structural characteristics of sub-Saharan African mantics: their institutionalisation, boundary crossing (especially the intercontinental connections will constitute a recurrent theme throughout this argument), and logocentricity. Inspired by a neurobiological perspective, the study of the prehistory of African divination, however inconclusive, will offer us as a key to its wide-ranging continuities in historical times. It will also help us to pinpoint such central features of divination as may account for its ubiquity, its range of variation, and its success: notably its objectifying mediation between person and world, through verbal pronouncements based on more or less elaborate classification schemes informing a divination system’s interpretative catalogue. In the process we will consider the divinatory forms of African hunter-gatherers in historical times. The prehistoric intercontinental ramifications of African divination (particularly involving China, North America, the Anatolia / Black Sea region, and Western Europe), viewed in a combined ‘Out-of-Africa’ and ‘Back-into-Africa’ model, will offer surprising clues to the origin and evolution of specific divinatory forms. Finally we discuss the intercultural epistemology of divination. Here the central puzzle is that African divination has been constructed by a global reductionist scholarship as mere make-believe, yet often appears deliver truths that may be more than just figments of the imagination and that seem to have a grounding in empirical reality; here we first state the mainstream solution affirming the quest for wisdom in a superabundance of clues whilst denying extrasensory knowledge; then offer a radical alternative inspired however by quantum mechanics.
April 2008
Article on Ethnicity in Central Africa, and work as Editorial Advisor, for the New Encyclopedia of Africa

publication of: Middleton, John M., with Joseph Miller, eds., New Encyclopedia of Africa, I-V, New York: Scribner's / Gale. To this gigantic project, a major codification of current African Studies, Wim van Binsbergen contributed extensively as Editorial Advisor -- an honour shared with just over a dozen other Africanists, including Ade Ajayi, Francis Deng, Basil Davidson, Valentin Mudimbe, Ali Mazrui, Jan Vansina, Goran Hyden, Sally Falk Moore, etc.

as an author, Wim van Binsbergen contributed an article on ethnicity in Central Africa:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, ‘Ideology of ethnicity in Central Africa’, in: Middleton, John M., with Joseph Miller, eds., New Encyclopedia of Africa, New York: Scribner’s/ Gale, vol. 2, pp. 319-328 (click for PDF)

in the same volume of the Encyclopaedia, the article 'Divination and oracles' by the prominent Belgium Africanist René Devisch situates Wim van Binsbergen's work on African divination within the general research endeavours in this field:

Devisch, René, 2008, ‘Divination and oracles’, in: Middleton, John M., with Joseph Miller, eds., New Encyclopedia of Africa, New York: Scribner / Gale , vol. 2, pp. 128-132 (click for PDF)

March 2008
Commission

In Hanover, Germany, Wim van Binsbergen participated in the final and decisive peer review committee meeting (March 2008) for the intercontinental research programme "Negotiating Culture in Contemporary African Societies", funded by the Volkswagen Foundation; he has been involved with this programme from 2007 onwards
 
Intensive one-day course on Intercultural Philosophy


Wim van Binsbergen presented an intensive one-day Dutch-language course in intercultural philosophy at the School for Comparative Philosophy, Antwerp, Belgium, 15 March 2008 (10.00-17.30 hrs), under the titel: Het Appèl van de Ander / The Other's Appeal. Click here for an brief description of the four constituent parts
 
Commission

As a member of one of the commission of the Foundation for Scientific Research, Belgium since the Fall of 2007, Wim van Binsbergen is intensively involved in the central Belgian institution for the evaluation and funding of academic research in the Humanities; the semi-annual meetings bring him to Brussels for a few days, every March and September.
February 2008
Article on flood myths as a test case for Oppenheimer's Sunda thesis -- now in the press

In February 2008, Wim van Binsbergen's Powerpoint Presentation on the Sunda thesis, presented at the 1st Annual Conference of the International Association of Comparative Mythology, Edinburgh 2007, was been worked into a article, currently in the press in the journal Cosmos: Journal of Ancient Cosmology (Univ. of Edinburgh); click here for a pre-print (PDF):

Wim van Binsbergen, in collaboration with Mark Isaak, in press (2008), 'Transcontinental mythological patterns in prehistory: A multivariate contents analysis of flood myths worldwide challenges Oppenheimer’s claim that the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East and the Bible originate from early Holocene South East Asia':

ABSTRACT. The present argument is devoted to the Sunda thesis, launched by the leading British geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer in 1998. He made two claims: (1) there was decisive Indonesian / Sundaland prehistoric cultural influence on West Asia (the General Sunda Thesis); (2) this influence is specifically manifest in the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East and the Bible (the Special Sunda Thesis). Van Binsbergen’s Aggregative Diachronic Model of Global Mythology, which is briefly introduced, suggests that many of the mythical themes for which Oppenheimer claims a unique Sunda origin, have a much older history elsewhere in the Old World. These themes may have undergone major transformations and innovations, in the Sunda context, and may have subsequently spread to Oceania and the western half of the Old World, in that context. The Nuah?ic (Noah-related) type of ‘Elaborate’ Flood Myth, centring on ‘The flood hero in his ark as an ally of the Supreme God’, is taken to be exemplary for the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East and of the Bible addressed in Oppenheimer’s Special Sunda Thesis. However, multivariate analysis (upon a contents analysis of a representative corpus of flood myths from all over the world), far from massively and unequivocally confirming Oppenheimer’s Special Sunda Thesis, merely makes plausible that for a minority of mythemic traits found in flood myths worldwide, a Sunda effect may be claimed, not for the origin of that trait, but for relatively minor aspects of its subsequent distribution. One multivariate analysis was based on discriminant analysis, another on factor analysis; both bring out that – pace Oppenheimer – most probably, and in line with conventional views, the mytheme of ‘The flood hero in his ark as an ally of the Supreme God’ originated in that form in Central Asia, and from there spread worldwide, also to Sundaland, from where sometimes a further spread with Sunda effect may be reconstructed. Far from being the source of Western, subsequently global, civilisation, as Oppenheimer claims, Sunda turns out to have been mainly a relatively recent recycling context. These statistical analyses unexpectedly highlight the possible role of the New World in the intercontinental prehistory of flood myths. They further demonstrate that the Nuah?ic mytheme is in itself composite; one or two of its twelve principal components could perhaps have originated in South East Asia or have been intercontinentally transmitted via that region from a New World origin.


Second-millennium BCE Babylonian cylinder seal,
thought to depict Utnapishtim (the Babylonian
equivalent of biblical Nuah) in the Ark; others read
this seal as a depiction of the water-god Ea.
January 2008
Conference preparations

In January 2008, Eric Venbrux (professor of religious anthropology, faculty for religious studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands) and Wim van Binsbergen started their preparatory work as joint convenors of the 2nd Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (see above, under August 2008)

     
Paper on wisdom as a key to intercultural epistemology now in the press

WISDOM: AFRICAN AND GLOBAL -- Wim van Binsbergen's key note addess presented at the International Symposium on Expressions of Traditional Wisdom, Brussels, Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, September 2007, has now been worked into an extensive paper, currently in the press with the Royal Belgian Academy for Overseas Sciences:

Wim van Binsbergen, in press, ‘Expressions of traditional wisdom from Africa and beyond: An exploration in intercultural epistemology’; click for PDF;

a shorter version has also been prepared, and is now in the press in the Symposium proceedings, click here for shorter version (PDF):

Wim van Binsbergen, in press , 'Expressions of traditional wisdom: What Africa can teach the world today' .

ABSTRACT FULL VERSION: Expressions of traditional wisdom from Africa and beyond: An exploration in intercultural epistemology: Wisdom is initially defined (cf. Aristotle) as creative practical knowledge that allows one to negotiate the contradictions of human life (especially in less rule-governed domains manifesting uncertainty and incompatible multiple truths), thus accepting that human life is social and finite. After indicating (1) the resilience of wisdom as a topic in modern thought and science, a overview follows of wisdom in various periods and regions of the world (2). (3) The dilemma of expression of wisdom: while scholarship thrives on specialist explicit language use, wisdom is often secret and risks being destroyed by expression and translation. (4) Offsets expressions of traditional wisdom against four modes of ‘tacit modern unwisdom’ (in such fields as corporality, conflict regulation, the concept of mind, and myth). (5) Can wisdom be transmitted interculturally, within and outside an academic context, and by what mechanism of situational oppositional framing is traditional wisdom both an alterised object of study and a site of identification and encounter. (6) Defining the specific difference between scientific and wisdom modes of knowing, in the former’s reliance on standard, repetitive, intersubjective procedures of knowledge formation embedded in limiting conditions. (7) The four modes of tacit modern unwisdom (cf. 4) are then contrasted with African perspectives. (8) Finally intercultural philosophy is argued to spring from a situation (today’s globalisation) where Western mainstream philosophy has to give way to a wisdom perspective as defined above.  

An African sage: The nature prophet, witchfinder and village headman Lubumba, photographed by the site owner at Njonjolo, Kaoma district, Zambia, Fall 1973; cf. van Binsbergen,m W.M.J., Religious change in Zambia, London / Boston: Kegan Paul, 1981.

ABSTRACT SHORTER VERSION: Expressions of traditional wisdom: What Africa can teach the world today: Wisdom is initially defined (cf. Aristotle) as creative practical knowledge that allows one to negotiate the contradictions of human life (especially in less rule-governed domains manifesting uncertainty and incompatible multiple truths), thus accepting that human life is social and finite. The argument begins with noting (1) the resilience of wisdom as a topic in modern thought and science. Next we deal (2) with the dilemma of expressionof wisdom: while scholarship thrives on specialist explicit language use, wisdom is often secret and risks being destroyed by expression and translation. Section (3) offsets expressions of traditional wisdom against four modes of ‘tacit modern unwisdom’ (in such fields as corporality, conflict regulation, the concept of mind, and myth). The four modes of tacit modern unwisdom are then contrasted (4) with African perspectives, where the human body is the recognised focus of wisdom; where conflict management stresses (at least at the local level) practical wisdom over impersonal and divisive rules; where the human mind is considered to be porous hence accessible through extrasensory means; and where, in the deep history of Anatomically Modern Humans, up to 60,000 years ago the foundations were laid for all the myth we all live by today, while also later mythological developments were to be percolated all over the world including Africa.
     
Public defence of the Ph.D. thesis of Julie Ndaya

click here for a link from which the entire book can be downloaded as PDF

18 January 2008: public defence of the PhD thesis of Julie Ndaya: Prendre le Bic: Le Combat spiritual congolais et les transformation sociales, Erasmus University Rotterdam, supervisors: Wim van Binsbergen and Walter van Beek, examiners: Valentin Mudimbe, Gerrie ter Haar and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Dutch girls of Congolese background gave breath-taking performances as traditional dancers at the celebration following the public defence


Professor Valentin Mudimbe (Duke University, Durham NC USA, and chair, International African Institute) as external examiner
Ce livre s'inscrit dans la très large problématique de la mondialisation culturelle et des transformations sociales. Il aborde la manière dont les femmes congolaises, aussi bien au Congo qu'en Europe, tentent de reconstruire leur identité en contournant les différents obstacles culturels. Cette reconstruction a lieu dans le cadre du mouvement religieux Le Combat Spirituel. Dans les analyses l'auteure s'inspire de la littérature au sujet du changement religieux pour appréhender la dynamique culturelle mise en place par Le Combat. Le contexte dans lequel ce groupe est né à Kinshasa est illustré à travers l'histoire de vie de la pionnière et les différents cas des adeptes. Ainsi apparaissent les tensions vécues par plusieurs femmes provenant des contradictions entre les différents systèmes culturels qui se sont disputé le terrain dans leur corps. Le Combat leur propose une alternative culturelle, exprimée à travers le terme lingala kobonguana: être guéri, être repenti. 'Prendre le bic' présente la production d'une sub-culture, à travers la dynamique de sélection des idiomes culturels locaux et mondiaux qui s'accommode mieux a la réalité au sein de laquelle protagonistes vivent.

Ndaya receives the doctoral bulla from the hands of Wim van Binsbergen, while the co-supervisor Walter van Beek looks on approvingly

Being an artist as well as an academic knowledge producer, Ndaya repaid each of her supervisors with a personal portrait bust secretly prepared on the basis of Polaroids, and festively handed over at the celebration following the public defence. Here Wim van Binsbergen is admiring the final product, displayed on Kuba raffia cloth from Congo
current year: 2008 (begins above this line; the closer to the top of the page, the nearer to 2009); click here for the years 2006-2007

on this page only current topicalities from the year 2008-2009 are included; the series was initiated in 2002; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2010-2011; and here for the years 2012-2013

proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work
 

 

page last modified: 21-04-2013 11:51:20