1 Current topicalities: as from the years 2010-2011
  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 2008-2009; and here for the years 2012-) is to alert the visitor of new additions and changes in the Shikanda portal, and to report on recent and forthcoming developments in Wim van Binsbergen's professional activities in the 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.

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

on this page only current topicalities from the year 2010- 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 2008-2009; and here for the years 2012-2013

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: ; abstracts and blurbs appear against a light blue background.

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November-December 2011

Hannah reads (in Dutch)

END-OF-YEAR NGOMA / SLAMATAN / ZERDA

In thanksgiving for the blessings of the past year, a home concert / poetry reading / reception / meal was offered at the van Binsbergen's home -- as in previous years. Accompanying herself on the South Asian tambura stringed instrument, Patricia van Binsbergen performed a few hymns from the North Indian dhrupad repertoire, which she has been studying for the past few years under Rotterdam conservatory lecturer Marianne Svasek (originally the latter was to take the lead in this performance along with her pakhavaj(hand drum)-playing husband, but both had been incapacitated by flu). Wim van Binsbergen then read an extensive selection from his new volume of image poetry, entitled Dendrogram (click here for the book's text and images). These readings were punctuated by four musical intermezzi of singing (including overtone singing), improvised by Patricia whilst accompanying herself on the South Asian musical instrument called srutibox. After half a decade of successfully competing for poetry prizes within grammar school and municipal contexts, Hannah van Binsbergen recently drafted her first full book of poetry, Gevaren van de voorstad (Dangers of the suburbs), from which she read four poems during our gathering. After a musical introduction on the piano by the pianist, piano pedagogue and poet, Marijke Kuneman, Wim van Binsbergen read the central poem 'Loy Krathong' from last year's volume Vanuit een nieuw lichaam van verlichting: Gedichten Thailand 2010 (click here for the book's text and images: formatted text or text with illustrations). The performing part of the session was concluded by Patricia's improvised singing while accompanying herself on the steel drum.

When playing the videos below at full screen, you can return to this page by pressing the Esc[ape] button on your computer's keyboard; you can select image quality between 480, 360 and 240

part of the audience

Patricia sings (in the universal language of improvisation)

The shrine of Sidi Mhammad al-Kabir in the highlands of N.W. Tunisia; this is one of the supernatural agencies (among several others from Africa, Asia and Europe) to which Wim van Binsbergen and his family make offerings several times a year -- in the case of Sidi Mhammad this has happened ever since his first fieldwork, 1968

Wim reads (in Dutch)
     
Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'Existential dilemmas of a North Atlantic anthropologist in the production of relevant Africanist knowledge', in: René Devisch & Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, The postcolonial turn: Re-imagining anthropology and Africa, Bamenda (Cameroon) / Leiden (the Netherlands): Langaa / African Studies Centre, pp. 117-142 (click for PDF)

the book's blurb:

This innovative book is a forward-looking reflection on mental decolonisation and the postcolonial turn in Africanist scholarship. As a whole, it provides five decennia-long lucid and empathetic research involvements by seasoned scholars who came to live, in local people's own ways, significant daily events experienced by communities, professional networks and local experts in various African contexts.

The book covers materials drawn from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Themes include the Whelan Research Academy, rap musicians, political leaders, wise men and women, healers, Sacred Spirit churches, diviners, bards and weavers who are deemed proficient in the classical African geometrical knowledge. As a tribute to late Archie Mafeje who showed real commitment to decolonise social sciences from western-centred modernist development theories, commentators of his work pinpoint how these theories sought to dismiss the active role played by African people in their quest for self-emancipation. One of the central questions addressed by the book concerns the role of an anthropologist and this issue is debated against the background of the academic lecture delivered by Rene Devisch when receiving an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Kinshasa. The lecture triggered critical but constructive comments from such seasoned experts as Valentin Mudimbe and Wim van Binsbergen. They excoriate anthropological knowledge on account that the anthropologist, notwithstanding her social and cognitive empathy and intense communication with the host community, too often fails to also question her own world and intellectual habitus from the standpoint of her hosts. Leading anthropologists carry further into great depth the bifocal anthropological endeavour focussing on local people's re-imagining and re-connecting the local and global. The book is of interest to a wide readership in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy and the history of the African continent and its relation with the North.

Rene Devisch is emeritus professor from the Catholic University of Leuven, Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa.

Francis B.Nyamnjoh is former lecturer at the Universities of Buea and Botswana, and former Head of publications of CODESRIA. He is now professor and Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.

René Devisch during his allocution as the recipient of a honorary doctorate from the University of Kinshasa, Congo, 2007; much of The Colonial Turn was triggered by this event (source: http://soc.kuleuven.be/web/images/7/38/Hphd_Rdevisch_1.JPG )

Francis Nyamnjoh as Professor and Head, Department of Anthropology, Cape Town, South Africa, 2011 (photo: © All rights reserved by Books LIVE )

     

The Great Enclosure of the Great Zimbabwe complex, one of the most
contested sites in the study of Africa’s transcontinental continuities in
pre- and protohistory

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: Rethinking Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory
(African Studies Centre, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands, 12-13 April 2012)
organising committee Marieke van Winden, Gitty Petit & Wim van Binsbergen; funding: African Studies Centre, Leiden (ASC), Leiden University Foundation (LUF) and the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam
-- this conference is to mark Wim van Binsbergen’s retirement from the African Studies Centre, Leiden, after 35 years

A provisional conference website has now been established, presenting the names of the prospective participants, with titles and abstracts of their papers (click to open conference webpage).

Among the participants are such illustrious names as Alain Anselin, Cathérine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Christopher Ehret, Dierk Lange, Li Anshan, Václav Blažek, Valentin Mudimbe, Sanya Osha, Mike Rowlands, Kurt Trautmann and Walter van Beek (alphabetical order). A few weeks before the conference, draft papers will be oploaded onto the conference website. Also further conference information will be made available from that website.

OBSERVERS. Specialists, interested non-specialists, and all people associated with Wim van Binsbergen in the course of his career are welcome to attend the first day of the conference with observer status (attendance fee EUR25). Considering the expected massive interest it is important to register beforehand. Please contact Marieke van Winden (WINDEN@ascleiden.nl ) for details.

At this conference, Wim van Binsbergen intends to present a paper entitled: 'Before the Presocratics: Cyclicity, transformation, and element cosmology as a likely pre- or protohistoric substrate in Africa, Eurasia and North America'. See the following abstract:

ABSTRACT. This argument seeks to contribute to the study of the global history of human thought and philosophy. It calls in question the popular, common perception of the Presocratic philosophers as having initated Western philosophy, and particularly of Empedocles as having initated the system of four elements as immutable and irreducible parallel components of reality. Our point of departure is the puzzling clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa, which turns out to evoke a cosmology of six basic dimensions, each of which consists of a destructor, something that is being destroyed, and a third, catalytic agent. This is strongly reminiscent of the East Asian correlative systems as in the yì jing cosmological system of changes based on the 64 combinations of the eight trigrams two taken at a time; and particularly of the five-element cosmology of Taoism in general, in which the basic relations between elements are defined as an unending cycle of transformations by which each element is either destructive or productive of the next. Further explorations into Ancient Egypt, India, sub-Saharan Africa and North America suggest, as a Working Hypothesis, that such a transformative cycle of elements may be considered a prehistoric substrate, possibly as old as dating from the Upper Palaeolithic, informing Eurasian, African and North American cosmologies; but possibly also only as recent as the Bronze Age, and transmitted transcontinentally in (proto-)historical times. With this Working Hypothesis we turn to the Presocratics and especially Empedocles, whose thought is treated in some detail. Here we find that the transformative and cyclic aspects of the putative substrate system also occasionally surface in their work and in that of their commentators (especially Aristotle and Plato), but only to be censored out in later, still dominant, hegemonic and Eurocentric interpretations. This then puts us to a tantalising dilemma: (1) Can we vindicate our Working Hypothesis and argue that the Presocratics have build upon, and transformed (as well as misunderstood!), a cosmology (revolving on the cyclical transformation of elements) that by their time had already existed for many centuries? Or (2) must we altogether reject our Working Hypothesis, give up the idea of very great antiquity and transcontinental distribution of a transformative element system as an Upper Palaeolithic substrate of human thought – and in fact revert to a Eurocentric position, where the attestations of element systems world-wide are primarily seen as the result of the recent transcontinental diffusion of Greek thought from the Iron Age onward. Both solutions will be considered. Typologically, but with considerable linguistic and comparative mythological support, our argument identifies essential consecutive steps (from ‘range semantics’ to binary oppositions to cyclical element transformations and dialectical triads), in humankind’s trajectory from Upper Palaeolithic modes of thought towards modern forms of discursive thought. It is here that the present argument seeks to make a substantial contribution to the theory and method of studying the prehistory of modes of thought worldwide. On the one hand we will present considerable linguistic arguments for the claim of great antiquity of the most rudimentary forms of element cosmology. On the other hand, we will apply linguistic methods to identify the origin, in West Asia in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, not of the postulated substrate system as a whole but at least of part of the nomenclature of the Chinese yì jing system. The region indicated constitutes a likely environment from where the ‘cross model’ as a mechanism of ‘Pelasgian expansion’ (van Binsbergen 2010 and in press; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011) might allow us to understand subsequent spread over much of the Old World and part of the New World – including the presence of the transformative element cycle among the Nkoya. However, in the penultimate section of the argument a strong alternative case will be presented: that for direct, recent demic diffusion from East or South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa in historical times.

a contemporary Chinese depiction of a giraffe presented to the Chinese emperor in the context of Admiral Zheng He's voyages, early 15th c. CE

     
Now published (in a memorial volume for Gerti Hesseling (1946-2009):

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'Human rights in the traditional legal system of the Nkoya people of Zambia', in: Jan Abbink & Mirjam de Bruijn, eds, Land, law and politics in Africa: Mediating conflict and reshaping the state, African Dynamics no. 10, Leiden / Boston: Brill, pp. 49-79 (click for fulltext PDF)

ABSTRACT. From a naive transcontinental perspective, the challenge surrounding human rights amounts to mediating and vindicating a North-Atlantic cultural product outside the North Atlantic in contexts that initially appear to be alien and inimical. From this perspective, human rights in Africa are part of the wider problematic of the continent's reception of North-Atlantic constitutional law. However, intercultural philosophy exposes this naive view as inherently hegemonic for attributing to the North-Atlantic region the monopoly of something that could, alternatively, be considered an inalienable achievement of humankind as a whole. This approach is disqualifying for persons outside the North Atlantic as it makes it more difficult for them to adopt human-rights thinking as potentially universal and as resonating with their own local concepts of personhood, integtity and freedom. The present argument challenges the hegemonic approach to human rights. On the basis of a study of the human-rights thinking in the traditional legal system of the Nkoya people of Western Central Zambia, I argue an endogenous, local historical basis for many of their human-rights concepts; moreover, the application of these rights in Nkoya society is often subtle and liberating. Finally, the Nkoya people even boast a few human rights for which there are no ready equivalents in standard North-Atlantic human-rights catalogues.

Gerti Hesseling in 2007
(photo Vincent van Binsbergen)
     
  From late October to mid-December 2011, Wim van Binsbergen was seriously ill. Apologies are offered for any inconvenience this may have caused in regard of his various publication, supervision and conference projects. By mid-December he turned out to be fully recovered.  
October 2011

pre-publication copy of:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'A unique Nkoya statuette associated with cults of affliction (Western Zambia)' (pre-publication copy) (click for PDF)

ABSTRACT. During my recent visit to Zambia (July 2011), where I have conducted historical and ethnographic fieldwork among the Nkoya people since 1972, I obtained a unique cult statuette that played a role in the diagnosis and treatment of cults of affliction – the latter, allegedly new and alien forms of possession considered to have entered the Zambian countryside from an eastern direction from the late 19th-century onward. In this paper I describe the artefact in detail, and seek to define its regional and long-range connectivity in space and time. The artefact, and its attending local exegesis, although apparently isolated in terms of style and technique, turns out to represent a cosmology and cosmogony which, far from being totally alien, appear to underlie much of social and ritual life in this part of South Central Africa before this worldview came to be almost completely eclipsed, first by the ascendance of the ancestral and royal cults in precolonial times, then by the advent of the colonial state, capitalism, and Christianity. This insight leads to a revision of my earlier approach to cults of affliction particularly my book Religious change in Zambia (1981).

A modern depiction of Mami Wata, an aquatic goddess with a wide
distribution in West and Central Africa, and (as this paper argues)
continuous with aquatic deities in Southern Africa, the Mediterranean
and throughout Eurasia

     

In May 2009, Wim van Binsbergen presented the following paper: ‘Giving birth to Fire: Evidence for a widespread cosmology revolving on an elemental transformative cycle, in Japan, throughout the Old World, and in the New World’, at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Kokugakuin Shinto University, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009; meanwhile this complex argument has been rewritten, so as to separate the specific analysis of Japanese mythology from the ambitious, transcontinental argument concerning a widespread postulated protohistorical substrate cosmology of a transformative cycle of elements. In anticipation of publication as a journal article, the Japanological argument now appears here in pre-publication preview:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'Giving birth to Fire: The Japanese cosmogonic myth of Izanami and Kagutsuchi in transcontinental perspective', pre-publication preview (click for PDF)

     
Further work on Comparative Mythology led to the following preliminary result:

van Binsbergen,Wim M.J., 2011, ‘Cosmic egg and Pelasgian realm: A distributional study in Comparative Mythology’ (click for PDF of PowerPoint presentation)

     

Matthew Schoffeleers 1928-2011

transcontinental connections of selected African stories as discussed in van Binsbergen's 2011 paper on Malawian stories

Now published

To a special issue in memory of Mathijs [ Matthew ] Schoffeleers by the leading scholarly journal of Malawi, The Society of Malawi Journal, Wim van Binsbergen is contributing not only an extensive obituary, but also an article on Schoffeleers' approach to Malawian folk tales:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'In memoriam Matthew Schoffeleers 1928-2011', in: Nthenda, Louis, & Mphande, Lupenga, Eds, The Society of Malawi Journal, Special Memorial Edition, 64, 3 (supplementary electronic edition), 2011: A Tribute to the Life of Fr. Matthew Schoffeleers (1928 — 2011): Malawianist, Renaissance man and free-thinker, pp. 1-6 (click for PDF)

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'Matthew Schoffeleers on Malawian suitor stories: A perspective from Comparative Mythology', in: Nthenda, Louis, & Mphande, Lupenga, Eds, The Society of Malawi Journal, Special Memorial Edition, 64, 3 (supplementary electronic edition), 2011: A Tribute to the Life of Fr. Matthew Schoffeleers (1928 — 2011): Malawianist, Renaissance man and free-thinker, pp. 76-94 (click for PDF)

Wim van Binsbergen's obituary of Matthew Schoffeleers is also being published in the Journal of Religion in Africa and on the website of the African Studies Centre, Leiden

left: wooden statuette of Mwandanjangula, collected in Angola 1998 -- note the female breast,
although the unilateral being Mwendanjangula, with only one side to his body, is usually
considered male in modern discourse; Mendanjangula plays a considerable
role in the mythology of South Central Africa (including Malawi) and in the present paper

     

In de maanden oktober-november 2011 schreef Wim van Binsbergen te Charakopio (Messanie, Griekenland), Antwerpen en Haarlem de dichtbundel Dendrogram, een samenhangende verzameling beeldgedichten (114 pp. inclusief foto's en aantekeningen), die binnenkort in druk zal verschijnen. Onderstaande flaptekst kenschetst de inhoud. Klik hier voor de digitale versie:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2011, Dendrogram: Olijfbomen beeldgedichten, Haarlem: Shikanda.

(N.B. gedicht en bijbehorende foto verschijnen naast elkaar op tegenoverliggende pagina's. Het laden kan een minuutje duren. Om de bestandsgrootte op internet laag te houden, is de kwaliteit van tekst en foto's veel minder dan in de gedrukte versie)

DENDROGRAM. De beelden in deze bundel zijn overwegend ontleend aan projectie van voor mij actuele of vanzelfsprekende inhouden op de aanschouwing van grillig gevormde olijfbomen in Zuid-Griekenland. Daarbij is de belangrijkste mededeling er een betreffende de ‘Textuur van het Zijnde’ – een onderwerp dat, ondanks zijn gruwelijke woordkeus (die echter normaal filosofisch taalgebruik weerspiegelt), niet tot de ene sectie van die naam beperkt blijft. Dit regardeert mijn inspanning, als dichter, Afrikaans waarzegger, en intercultureel filosoof, om een wereldbeeld te formuleren waarin plaats is voor de kennis van zowel het moderne Noordatlantisch gebied met zijn wetenschap en technologie, als van het oude Afrika met zijn – naar ik ontdekt heb, naast anderen – waarheidsgetrouwe waarzegmethoden en effectieve magie. Oppervlaktestructuren, spanningsvelden, plastieke torsies, onverzoenlijke maar tijdelijk ontveinsde tegenstellingen, als kenschetsing van de werkelijkheid, vormen het hoofd­thema van deze bundel. Zij zijn geconcretiseerd in een vijftal secties: Dendrogram; Textuur van het Zijnde; Mythische voortijd; Eigentijds; en Autobiografisch. Ik stel mij op het standpunt dat een tekst grotendeels zelfstandig is en door elke lezer op eigen wijze geïnterpreteerd mag worden ongeacht de oorspronkelijke bedoelingen van de schrijver. Niettemin zijn de voor mijzelf actuele en vanzelfsprekende inhouden voor de meeste lezers onbekend en duister, zodat zij uitnodigen tot korte toelichtingen – waarmee deze bundel, evenals mijn vorige, mijn eigen paden in leven en werk documenteert, en de verbindingen daartussen laat zien.
     

Wim van Binsbergen in front of the Artemis temple at Brauron,
eastern Attica, 2011; here 'Pelasgian' female puberty rites were
conducted somewhat reminiscent of those of Niger-Congo speaking sub-Saharan Africa

In mid-October 2011 Wim van Binsbergen and his wife travelled extensively in Greece. Click here for a short report on the relevance of this trip for Wim van Binsbergen's ongoing research and literary writing (this lavishly illustrated file loads slowly and is best downloaded using Save Target As...).

'Pelasgian' wall fragment from Zagani Hill, Attica, 3000-2500 BCE
(now at the Athenian international airport museum) -- reminiscent
of masonry of Southern African Iron Age sites; similar masonry
may also be found at Ancient Olympia, NW Peloponnesus, Greece

September 2011
15 September 2011: deadline for the submission of titles and abstracts for Wim van Binsbergen's valedictory conference 'Rethinking Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory' (Leiden, The Netherlands, c. 12-13 April 2012); click for Call for Papers and for Addition to Call for Papers; title and abstract to be sent to Mrs Marieke van Winden MA at: WINDEN@ascleiden.nl  
   

Muhammad Seifikar;
photo: Mels van der Mede
Wim van Binsbergen acts as external examiner of the PhD thesis written by Muhammad Seifikar on 'Universals in Ethics and Politics', Department of Philosophy, Gendt University, Belgium, 2 September 2011
August 2011


Wim van Binsbergen (left) and Fred Woudhuizen; photo Mels van der Mede

Now published

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Woudhuizen, Fred, C., 2011, Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory, British Archaeological Reports (BAR) International Series No. 2256, Oxford: Archaeopress, 519 pp., 84 figures, 46 tables, cumulative bibliography, index of proper names, authors index, ISBN 978-1-4073-0823-4, £70.

To be ordered from: http://www.hadrianbooks.co.uk

Click here for an extensive summary of the book and bio-/bibliographical details on the two authors (PDF)

In addition to the Preliminaries, the book consists of the following five parts:

  1. PART I. ETHNICITY IN MEDITERRANEAN PROTO-HISTORY: EXPLORATIONS IN THEORY AND METHOD: With extensive discussions of the Homeric catalogue of ships, the Biblical Table of Nations, and the Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age, against the background of a long-range comparative framework,
    BY WIM M.J. VAN BINSBERGEN, p. 17
  2. PART II. THE ETHNICITY OF THE SEA PEOPLES: AN HISTORICAL, ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC STUDY,
    BY FRED C. WOUDHUIZEN, p. 191
  3. PART III. THE ETHNICITY OF THE SEA PEOPLES: A SECOND OPINION,
    BY WIM M.J. VAN BINSBERGEN, p. 331
  4. PART IV. THE ETHNICITY OF THE SEA PEOPLES: TOWARDS A SYNTHESIS, AND IN ANTICIPATION OF CRITICISM,
    BY WIM VAN BINSBERGEN & FRED C. WOUDHUIZEN, p. 395
  5. PART V. REFERENCE MATERIAL: CUMULATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEXES, p. 419

In addition to: the extensive summary of the book as a whole (click here), click the following links to have a look at fulltext previews (click for PDFs) of

The book's principal focus is on the Mediterranean Bronze Age and the massive political, linguistic and ethnic changes marking that period's end; meanwhile, this chapter particularly dwells on this book's great relevance for, and indebtedness to, African Studies and Intercultural Philosophy, whilst presenting an overview of the main methodological and theoretical tools to be deployed in the course of its argument

or click here for a fulltext download of the entire book

     

This book reflects the intellectual encounter, over the years, between, on the one hand, a group of Dutch scholars studying the Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient Egypt and Africa, and, on the other hand, Martin Gardiner Bernal (photo: front cover) as one of the most challenging and innovative, but also controversial and criticised, scholars of recent decades. From the 1980s on, Bernal has claimed that the roots of Western civilisation were to be sought not in Ancient Greece but outside Europe, in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and ultimately in sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal has wrought havoc in Western identity, addressing hot issues such as racism, exclusion, cultural domination, White and North Atlantic hegemony. He has combined a preference for non-mainstream theories (including Afro-centrism) with a passion for ad-hominem arguments derived from his personal sociology of knowledge. In this way he has blazed a trail of polemics and conflicts throughout a considerable number of international scholarly fields, learned journals, and conferences.

Deriving from one such conference, with three original contributions by Bernal himself, and greatly expanded and updated, the present collection as a whole does not (contrary to the 2008 Warwick conference on Bernal) call for canonisation of the Black Athena thesis as a main-stream achievement of empirical research. It does however call for recognition of Martin Bernal as the courageous and visionary initiator of an inspiring and timely research programme. His Black Athena series has greatly contributed to raising the question of the global politics of knowledge, from heresy, to becoming the very boundary condition of scholarly and institutional integrity. In this sense of maturation, self-transcendence and limitation, we may say that Black Athena comes of age.

Molly Myerowitz Levine, prominent contributor to the Black Athena debate, called the present collection when published in the scholarly journal TALANTA ‘the most interesting, constructive, and substantive treatment of Black Athena to date’.

Now published:

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen, 2011, ed., Black Athena comes of age: Towards a constructive reassessment, Berlin - Münster - Wien - Zürich - London: LIT, numerous figures and tables, extensive general index, 368 pp., ISBN 978-3-8258-4808-8
(click
here for the book's Table of Contents; and here for the book's general index)

To be ordered from:
http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-8258-4808-8

An earlier version was published as a special issue of the archaeological journal TALANTA in 1997. This already contained three seminal texts by Wim van Binsbergen, now appearing in the present book in the following form:

For the present book edition, the original collection was augmented with

  • Fred Woudhuizen's paper: 'The bee-sign (Evans no. 86): An instance of Egyptian influence on Cretan Hieroglyphic' (pp. 283-296), and with three new texts by Wim van Binsbergen which bring the collection up to date:

Mediterranean cameo representing the goddess Athena, dating from the early Common Era, and found in Meroe, N. Sudan


Martin Bernal, author of the Black Athena thesis (from mid-1980s onwards) and initiator of the ensuing Black Athena debate

June-July 2011

Cranes and Pygmies (with connotations of the juxtaposition of Heaven and Earth, but also of Africa and Eurasia) depicted as fighting, on the Aryballos vase, Greece, 570 BCE

Please feel free to circulate this call for papers among your scholarly network; you will be doing us a great service

Conference announcement and call for papers

Rethinking Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory

an international conference marking the retirement of Wim van Binsbergen (convenor / editor), and one of the activities in the context of the 65th anniversary of the African Studies Centre, Leiden (the Netherlands)

Leiden, the Netherlands, ca. 12-13 April 2012 (exact vanue and dates to be announced)

click here for the call for papers

and for further inspiration click here for an addition to the original call for papers

this conference is open to Africanists, linguists, geneticists, comparative mythologists, archaeologists, comparative anthropologists / ethnologists, historicans, classicists, Egyptologists, Afrocentrists, and to any scholar who proposes to make an original and path-breaking contribution to the topic

Prospective participants are hereby invited to submit the title and abstract of their proposed contribution by 15 September 2011 (e-mail to Mrs Marieke van Winden at: WINDEN@ascleiden.nl ). These proposals will be responded to before 15 October 2011, and accepted papers are to be submitted by 15 March 2012 to be included in the prospective conference website. Depending on available funding (for which additional applications are still in progress) acceptance is to provide for a substantial core group of participants, paid travel to Leiden v.v. and accommodation there -- and an inevitably somewhat less generous arrangement for other accepted participants.

Please feel free to circulate this call for papers among your scholarly network; you will be doing us a great service

The world distribution of the RH-D genetic marker, one of the Rhesus markers often interpreted as indicative of transcontinental continuities among Anatomically Modern Humans

     

Chief Mwene Kahare Kubama II Yeshi during the Kazanga ceremony in the mid-1990s; for more recent Kazanga photographs, click here
field trip to Kazanga 2011: The annual cultural ceremony of the Nkoya people, Western Zambia (click here for extensive field report)

In the first three weeks of July, 2011, Wim van Binsbergen visited Zambia in order to attend, once more, the annual Kazanga ceremony, on which he has published at length from the 1990s onwards (1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2003 (a), 2003 (b)). The 2011 festival was to take place in Kaoma district on 2 and 3 July 2011, but was postponed by two weeks due to national mourning following the death of former President Chiluba, and pressing other commitments of the Zambian Vice President who was determined to attend the ceremony. Wim van Binsbergen's visit was on the invitation of the Lusaka-based National Executive of the Kazanga Cultural Association.

click here for the programme of the Kazanga Festival 2011

and click here for the official Information leaflet for Kazanga 2011, prepared by the Regional Executive Kaoma of the Kazanga Association, but unfortunately only available in a few copies during the actual festival.

This trip has enabled van Binsbergen to revive old contacts and trace new developments among the Nkoya people, who have formed one of the few central inspirations of his Africanist research since the early 1970s. In this connection he prepared a short proposal entitled:
Provisional topics for discussion during Prof. Wim van Binsbergen’s visit to the Nkoya community in Lusaka and Kaoma in the context of the 2011 Kazanga festival, July 2011 (click).
The Kazanga Association prepared
an extensive programme for Wim van Binsbergen's visit (click) -- indicative of high national and international political ambitions that forty years ago, when the visitor started his research on the Nkoya people, were absolutely unheard of among this ethnic minority.

He revisited Nkoya society in the pursuit of the historical and anthropological questions that have informed his Zambian research for decades, but also with the specific new questions that have emerged in his comparative research of the last decade, notably the continuities between African and Eurasian mythologies, and cultural connections between Africa and Asia in pre- and protohistory (see below, entry for April-May 2011).

As a member of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, Wim van Binsbergen has also taken this opportunity to look into broader issues of research co-operation and research strategy at the regional and national level in Zambia, in that connection especially reviving his long-standing intellectual and institutional contacts with the University of Zambia, where he was a Lecturer of Sociology in 1971-74, and subsequently an affiliate of the Institute for African Studies (formerly Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, now Institute for Economic and Social Research -- INESOR). In preparation of this aspect of his trip, Wim van Binsbergen produced a short proposal
'Investigating the possibility of creating an intercontinental research hub focussing on Zambia' (click).

An extensive analytical report on this field trip has been prepared:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, The Kazanga Ceremony, Kaoma district, and the University of Zambia – Provisional report on a fieldtrip to Zambia, July 2011, with numerous photographs and video clips

Meanwhile a 200 pp. draft report on this field trip has been completed. Moreover, as a result of this field trip, Wim van Binsbergen could revise his approach to cults of affliction / ecstatic cults, their underlying worldview, and their history, see:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'A unique Nkoya statuette associated with cults of affliction (Western Zambia)' (pre-publication copy) (click for PDF)

Chief Mwene Kabulwebulwe (a lady) during
the Kazanga ceremony in the mid-1990s; for
more recent Kazanga photographs, click here

     


from left to right: Simon Simonse, Jos van der Klei, Klaas de Jonge and Wim van Binsbergen, June 2011
Amsterdam Working Group on Marxist Anthropology, 35 years later

In the late 1970s, seven Dutch anthropologists (Reini Raatgever, Klaas de Jonge, Simon Simonse, Jos van der Klei, Johan van de Walle, Peter Geschiere and Wim van Binsbergen) teamed up to form the Amsterdam Working Group on Marxist Anthropology, seeking to refine and apply the conceptual and theoretical apparatus of neo-Marxist anthropology to the empirical data they derived from their recent or ongoing fieldwork and reading, mainly but not exclusively in relation with Africa. Beside the developments in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, around SUN Socialistische Uitgeverij Nijmegen (Socialist Publishing House Nijmegen) and the philosopher / anthropologists Ton Lemaire, the Amsterdam initiative proved to be a major, highly influential step in the reception of neo-Marxism in the social sciences in the Netherlands. The group produced a Dutch-language book: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Geschiere, Peter L., 1982, red., Oude produktiewijzen en binnendringend kapitalisme, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit / Free University Press (now available at Google books), of which three years later an extensively rewritten English version appeared: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Peter L. Geschiere, 1985, eds, Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment: Anthropological explorations in Africa, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International (now available at Google books). Even before the publication of the Dutch book, the group dwindled without manifest causes, and in the next decades the seven members each went their way as brothers in a folktale, without ever totally losing sight of one another. Half a life later they are trying to revive their former bond. A first informal meeting took place in Amsterdam, 9 June 2011, and more are to follow.


The Amsterdam Working Group on Marxist Anthropology, c. 1977 (incomplete, from left to right: Johan van der Walle, Wim van Binsbergen, Simon Simonse, Klaas de Jonge, Reini Raatgever with on her lap the infant Geertje van der Klei, Henk Meilink (guest), Peter Geschiere -- missing is Jos van der Klei, in whose house the meeting took place and who took the photograph
April-May 2011
Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, 'Expressions of traditional wisdom: What Africa can teach the world today', Annales: Centre Universitaire de Kasumbalesa, Extension de l'Université de Lubumbashi, 1, 1: 25-55 (click for PDF)

     
African-originating Kaffîrs as a recognised ethnic group in Sri Lanka

The focus in this research project is on African-Asian connections in pre- and protohistory. In terms of a seminal hypothesis underlying the present research project, already from the 3rd mill. BCE an intercontinental trade network was being established centring on the Indian Ocean but ramifying to China, West Africa and the Mediterranean, Sri Lanka. Much later, from Early Modern times on, Sri Lanka has been part of a European-dominated intercontinental mercantile network that extended, from Western Europe, across the Atlantic to the New World, as well as, along the African Atlantic coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, then along the East African Coast and Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean, to South Asia (including Ceylon / Sri Lanka), South East Asia, East Asia, and gradually even the Pacific. From the early 16th century, Africans -- especially from Mozambique -- were brought to Sri Lanka as slaves, under Portuguese and Dutch (VOC / United East India Company) mercantile rule; when the British took over in 1796, for decades more Africans were brought to the island (as well as to other parts of South Asia), as slaves and especially soldiers. They came to reinforce the emergent ethnic group of [Ceylon / Lankan] Kaffîrs, initially mainly Muslims and Portuguese speaking, gradually shifting to Roman Catholicism as a religion (with many African substrate traditions), and to Sinhalese or Tamil as language. They take pride in their ethnic name and despite its pejorative connotations elsewhere in the world, do not consider it a slur. Dwindling and culturally eroded / assimilating, Kaffîr communities can be found in a broad crescent along Sri Lanka's West-North-and East Coast, from Colombo (especially the significantly named Slave Island quarter) to Baticaloa; constraints of time, the different historical focus of the present research, and the aftermath of the civil war (1983-2009) made us avoid these areas and instead concentrate on the complementary parts of the island. The major Lankan dance style Baila is associated with Kaffîrs, and their music, streamlined and commoditified in ways only too familiar from the last few decades globally (including Nkoyaland), are now going through a hype in the urban amusement industry. It is not impossible that it is also to this relatively recent African influx that Sri Lanka owes some of its apparent African traits e.g. the mankala board game ('Kolumbo olinda'), some musical instruments, and some forms of ecstatic cults of affliction. Yet the present research suggests, for these institutions, much older, Bronze Age or even Neolithic eastbound transfers from Africa, or derivation from a common Neolithic substrate originating in West Asia -- while for the cults of affliction a recent trans-Oceanic transfer but from (Little-Tradition) Buddhist South Asia to Africa, appears to be more likely. The short video movie to the right, on Kaffir culture, © Kannan Arunasalam, derived from the public domain with thanks, offers a useful first introduction.

Fieldwork in Sri Lanka (click here for an extensive photo essay)

From 10 April to 13 May 2011 Wim van Binsbergen (accompanied by his wife Patricia, who among other qualifications holds an MA in African Studies) conducted extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka, as the (pen-)ultimate leg in a series of Asian explorations from the mid 2000's onwards towards van Binsbergen's new book on African-Asian continuities in pre- and protohistory, working title Out of Africa or Out of Sundaland (one of the projects lined up for inclusion in the proposed new subprogramme 'Africa in the World' of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands). The circumstantial evidence for such continuities is considerable, both in the field of comparative ethnography (van Binsbergen's most relevant field of expertise in this connection), and in such fields as genetics, linguistics, archaeology, comparative mythology, and the history of plant and animal domestication. Extensive preliminary sketches have already been made in the form of a full-size book draft with the working title Out of Africa or out of Sundaland, along with detailed, but more provisional and fragmentary regional sketches already provisionally posted on this website, on the basis of earlier trips to Java (2007 and 2010), Bali (2010, with subsequent reflections), Borneo (2010), Thailand (2010), and the Cameroonian Western Grassfields (2006) -- while the world of Asian Buddhism was further explored during trips to China (2002 and 2006) and Japan (2005 and 2009), and comparative reflexions on the Homa fire cult ranging from Vedic times to present-day Hindu and Buddhist Asia (see entry on October 2010, below). This extension of his research activities into Asia has owed much to his close association with the Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies, Harvard University (Michael Witzel) throughout the years 2000. The overall critical inspiration (Stephen Oppenheimer's General and Special Sunda theories in his book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, 1998) was subjected to a quantitative analysis based on a global sample of flood myths, published (with the collaboration of Mark Isaak) in Cosmos. Meanwhile, a lavishly illustrated preliminary account of the recent findings in Sri Lanka has now been prepared (click here). As empirical operationalisation of Asian-African continuities we have concentrated on topics that, over the decades, have played a major role in van Binsbergen's comparative research: kingship; cults of affliction / trance and possession cults; herbalism; divination; board games; representational art; music and dance; maritime transport technology; tree cults; megalithic cults. During the field trip to Sri Lanka, an overwhelming amount of promising empirical clues was collected, documented in thousands of photographs and many hours of video recordings. Extensive reflection on Thailand (2010) highlighted Buddhism as a possible context for the transmission of Asian themes to sub-Saharan Africa in the course of the last one or two millennia -- especially in the form of kingship and ecstatic cults. There was further corroboration of the hypothetical existence, at least from the Early Mediterranean Bronze Age onward (third millennium BCE), of a transcontinental maritime network of trade and cultural transmission, stretching from West Africa and the Mediterranean, to China. However, while the Buddhist context would make us stress Africa-bound transfers and put Africa on the passive, receiving side of Asian-African continuities (and the same suggestion emanates from van Binsbergen's studies of transcontinental continuities in the fields of divination, boardgames, and cults of affliction), the present trip -- while drawing attention to the Early Modern, Kaffir African influence on South Asia -- inspired considerable rethinking on this point of pre- and proto-history, and highlighted -- rather in line with Afrocentrist thinking, e.g. by the USA educationalist and linguist Clyde Winters -- the existence of a Asia-bound complex of transmission from Africa especially in the last three millennia BCE. In a recent article, van Binsbergen reviewed a number of major analytical models for these long-range historical relationships, including Frobenius' South Erythraean model, Oppenheimer's Sunda model and his own Pelasgian model; the latter model is illuminating in that it defines a substrate informing both (West, South, South East, and East) Asian cultures, and sub-Saharan cultures, in the last two millennia BCE, and therefore helps to explain part of any transcontinental continuities that may be established, by reference to a common West Asian source in Neolithic times or earlier. Yet perhaps the most important result of this trip has been a growing awareness of the methodological and typological requirements and presuppositions of this type of research, in the light of which also the already available parts of the proposed book will be revised.

In addition to an extensive photo essay in the present website, a 250 pp draft report on this fieldtrip has meanwhile been completed.

Introducing Kaffir culture of Sri Lanka, © Kannan Arunasalam


A priestess in her shrine dedicated to the god Kataragama / Skanda, and engaged in trance divination, near Polonnaruwa


No fieldwork on religion is possible without exploring the material, productive side of social life at the same time; here Patricia van Binsbergen is dragged through calf-deep mud in order to participate in rice planting, near Polonnaruwa

   

Prof.Dr. Douwe Jongmans
1922-2011
BEREAVEMENTS / TWO CASES OF ANCESTOR VENERATION

While Wim van Binsbergen was away on fieldwork in Sri Lanka, two of his principal teachers of anthropology passed away: Douwe Jongmans (1922-2011) who initiated Wim van Binsbergen to the complex intercultural practice of ethnographic and ethnohistorical fieldwork and to North African ethnography; and Matthew Schoffeleers (1928-2011), specialist on Malawi and on African religion, who worked closely together with Wim van Binsbergen in the (pre- and proto-)historical study of African religion, and who conferred a doctorate upon him from the Free University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1979, with Bonno Thoden van Velzen as external examiner, and Terence Ranger on the committee. Not having been able to personally pay his respects at the graveside due to fieldwork absence, Wim van Binsbergen here honours these eminent teachers and friends with obituaries (click on the respective names).

The contradictions of van Binsbergen's career are brought out by these two recent deaths, rendering Douwe Jongmans and Matthew Schoffeleers all the dearer, and all the more sorely missed. It is striking that these two deaths should have occurred when Wim van Binsbergen, for the first time in his long Africanist career and half a year before retirement, had formally obtained institutional funds for the specific purpose of doing fieldwork far outside Africa, applying the Jongmansian techniques and communicative stances in Sri Lanka, in a bid to bring to light what van Binsbergen thinks are the transcontinental, cross-Indian Ocean strands in African religion -- in whose study Matthew Schoffeleers was, after all, his closest ally.

Wim van Binsbergen's obituary of Matthew Schoffeleers has meanwhile appeared on the website of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands (where Schoffeleers served as a Deputy Chairman in the early 1980s), and has been accepted to appear in the Journal on Religion in Africa; it is likewise to appear in a special issue on Matthew Schoffeleers of the main Malawian academic journal, along with a revised version of Wim van Binsbergen's comments on Schoffeleers' analysis of Malawian fairy-tales featuring superhuman suitors, apparently in a context of long-distance trade (click here for an older version of Wim van Binsbergen's paper).


Prof.Dr. Jan-Mathijs Schoffeleers
1928-2011

follow the link for an obituary by Wim van Binsbergen, which also contains Jos Damen's provisional bibliography of Schoffeleers' works

also see Kees Brusse’s brief obituary for Matthew Schoffeleers, ‘In de ban van de heidenen’, Vrij Nederland, 4 June 2011-06-10

     
  Op 7 april zal Wim van Binsbergen de vierde en afsluitende lezing verzorgen van een serie over 'Mythen en mythologieën' georganiseerd door het Albertinumgenootschap te Nijmegen. De andere sprekers in deze serie zijn de hoogleraren Mineke Schipper en Bart Vervaeck, en Dr Hugo Koning  
March 2011
     
Completed at long last (and scheduled for publication August 2011, see there, above)

One of the fruits of the sabattical period which Wim van Binsbergen has enjoyed during the first three months of 2011, has been the final completion (camera-ready MS) of the very extensive book (98 figures, 45 tables, over 2 million chrs, spaces not counted):

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Woudhuizen, Fred, C., 2011, Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory, British Archaeological Reports International Series, Oxford: Archaeopress, 519 pp., numerous figures and tables, cumulative bibliography, index of proper names, authors index.

This book, on which both authors have worked for nearly a decade, has now been accepted by the publishers (Archaeopress, Oxford), and is scheduled to appear in the British Archaeological Reports International Series August-September 2011 (see there, above).

   
  Now completed

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen, 'Human rights in the traditional legal system of the Nkoya people of Zambia', contribution for: de Bruijn, Mirjam, Abbink, Jon, and Kante, Baboucar, eds, 2011 [Memorial volume for Gerti Hesseling, Leiden: Brill]; click here for the extended, rough PDF (the book version had to be severely shortened at the cost, particularly, of theoretical sections)

due to the editorial conception of this book, a short personal passage had to be deleted from the above article; it now appears here as:

Wim M.J., 2011, 'Gerti Hesseling (1946-2009): A short memoir'

 
February 2011
10 February 2011: The public defence of Stephanus Djunatan's PhD thesis The principle of affirmation is to take place in the Senate Hall of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, 11:30 hrs; supervisors: Professors Wim van Binsbergen and Bambang Sugiharto

Traditionally the successful public defence is concluded with a laudatory address ('Laudatio', in Latin) delivered by the (first) supervisor. Click here for the laudatio delivered on this occasion.

the image shows (full circle) the prospective young doctor, and (broken circle) one of his supervisors, during fieldwork (syncretistic Sufi pilgrimage at the devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, West Bandung, Java, Indonesia, 2010).

January 2011
     


The West African god Shango

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, Shimmerings of the Rainbow Serpent: Towards the interpretation of crosshatching motifs in Palaeolithic art: Comparative mythological and archaeoastronomical explorations inspired by the incised Blombos red ochre block, South Africa, 70 ka BP, and Nkoya female puberty rites, 20th c. CE., PDF, 70 pp., 4 tables, over 50 illustrations (originally written March 2006; greatly revised and expanded January 2011; draft version)

or if you have enough time, click here for a fast-loading PowerPoint emulation of the same argument

On the basis of my Aggregative Diachronic Model of Global Mythology theory, and further inspired by other prehistoric attestations of crosshatching and by my own ethnographic fieldwork into female puberty rites among the Nkoya people of present-day Zambia (1972-1995), I will propose a very specific meteorological reading of the Blombos pattern – as a representation of the Rainbow ( - Serpent), probably in an initiatory ritual context.
Of course, crosshatching is ubiquitous, one of the most obvious ways of graphically treating a surface, and my argument does not in the least pretend that all crosshatching, in prehistory or later, is to be understood in this manner. Various alternatives from a number of continents will be considered in my argument; some of these (in terms of the Lightning Bird / Rain, and of the Milky Way) will turn out to be remarkably related to the Rainbow Serpent pattern – as systematic counterparts, or as systematic transformations, still with a meteorological or cosmic reference.
More important than the apparent, and no doubt ephemeral, result in terms of such specific interpretations, my argument aims to contribute to the development of methodology in the highly problematic but rapidly expanding field of symbolic archaeology.
The scientific interpretation of apparently meaningful patterns without a local and contemporary, ‘emic’ explanatory metatext at our disposal constitutes a well-known problem in anthropology. We encounter this hermeneutical problem all the time when making knowledge claims about ulterior implied meanings (not explicitly stated by the local actors, and perhaps even not consciously known to them) in cultural patterns not our own. The positivistic position, popular in anthropology in the middle of the 20th century CE, was to reject all such scientific claims if they were not emically supported, i.e. by the local actors’ explicit conscious verbal statements; however, this position has now been recognised as too narrow – thanks to the influence of structuralism, psychoanalysis and more recently, cognitive science.

The Blombos red ochre incised block, South Africa, 70,000 Before Present


Rainbow Serpent, Australian rock art, undated

current year: 2011 (begins above this line; the closer to the top of the page, the nearer to 2012)
November - December 2010

An Africanist exploring South East Asia: learning to play the gamelan at Rawabogo desa, Ciwidey, West Java; musical ensembles in South Central Africa (e.g. royal orchestras), and even West Africa, appear to owe (as claimed by A.M. Jones 1964) a considerable debt to gamelan and xylophone musical traditions of South East Asia -- or is the historical connection the other way around?

Main findings of Wim van Binsbergen’s research in 2010 compressed into 150 words (for detailed discussion and substantiation see the specific entries for 2010, below)

1. The othering of Africa has dominated North Atlantic scholarship, yet there has been much African-Eurasian socio-cultural, religio-mythological, linguistic and genetic continuity – attributable, not primarily to the of-Africa Exodus of Anatomically Modern Humans (c. 60,000 Before Present), but especially to the Back-into-Africa migration (from 15.000 BP).
2. The impact of Islam and Christianity on sub-Saharan Africa is recognised, but also Hinduism / Buddhism must be acknowledged as major, though submerged, influences on East, Southern and West Africa – an aspect of South East, South and East Asian influence on Africa in pre- and protohistory.
3. African societies have excelled in the social technology of reconciliation locally and regionally – however, the weak nature of Africa’s formal organisations; particularist divisiveness; failing idioms of universalism; and the dislocated and alienated African subjecthood; have largely prevented the national and international application of this asset.
4. African wisdom potentially addresses major ills of post-modern global society.
5. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena thesis sees Ancient Greek, subsequently West European, ultimately global, civilisation as exclusively a product of Ancient Egypt and ultimately of sub-Saharan Africa; this Afrocentrist view must be largely rejected on empirical grounds, but should be applauded for focussing on the global politics of knowledge.

an Africanist exploring South East Asia: at the end of an arduous journey through the jungle of Thailand

     

present-day popular Islamic ritual (but note the Hinduist / Buddhist hand gesture) on the apparent remnants of a megalithic corridor grave at the site of Nagara Padang
As indicated in the section for April 2010, during his visit to Bandung, Indonesia, Wim van Binsbergen was commissioned to write a report on the Catholic University Bandung's students' research training project at the devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, some 30 km south of Bandung. This report already touched on the shrine's history and prehistory, and on the comparative ethnography and general theory of shrine cults. This report has now been greatly enlarged so as to incorporate a discussion and illustrations of further prehistoric features such as cupmarks, leading up to a provisional model of the site's composite religious history since the Upper Palaeolithic:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, The devotional mountain shrine of Nagara Padang, village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Bandung, Java, Indonesia: Comparative historical and theoretical reflections with implications for the student research training project organised at the site by the Catholic University Bandung’s Department of Philosophy

Abstract. The devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Bandung, Indonesia, plays a central role in the research of the author’s PhD candidate Mr Stephanus Djunatan, a lecturer of philosophy at the Parahyangan Catholic University (UNPAR), Bandung, who is scheduled to publicly defend his PhD thesis before the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in February 2011. The author himself returned to the shrine in 2010, three years after his first visit, and this time in the context of a massive student research training project supervised by c. 10 UNPAR lecturers including Mr Djunatan. Leaning heavily on the latter’s work, the author’s argument briefly describes the main features of the shrine and of a large collective pilgrimage there starting from the village of Rawabogo. In a more original vein, the argument highlights the syncretistic signature of the shrine’s cult (apparently a mixture of Islamic, Hinduist, Buddhist and animistic elements, going back to the first half of the second millennium CE). Parallels are drawn not only with the Borobudur devotional shrine of Central Java, but also with North Africa (where the author has studied, since 1967, shrine cults in the context of popular Islam) and with sub-Saharan Africa (where in at least three places, as widely apart as Malawi, Cameroon and Uganda, somewhat similar, symbolically and cultically charged rock formations may be found, especially associated with the idea of the emergence of the first people from the earth or their descent from heaven). The possibility of an extreme antiquity for the Nagara Padang site as a cult centre is further suggested by its reminiscences of Upper Palaeolithic initiatory rituals of spiritual (re-)birth, with the novice having to press oneself through a narrow rock crevice. The presence of at least one menhir and of numerous cupmarks on the top of the site suggests continuity with the widespread Indonesian megalithic complex, with contested affinities throughout South East and East Asia, and the rest of the Old World – and Bronze Age dating. These discussions are supported by numerous illustrations. Against the background of a selection of the scholarly literature the anthropological theory of shrine cults (also called regional cults) is presented in a nutshell – with emphasis on Victor Turner’s concept of communitas. This finally allows the author to comment, as requested by the organisers, on the considerable merits of the student research training project.

The relevance of this study in the context of Wim van Binsbergen's current research projects (particularly his book in preparation Out of Africa or out of Sundaland? ) is that it constitutes a useful reminder of the fact that apparent continuities between South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa need not be attributed to specific cultural transmission between either region, but may also derive from a common prehistoric substrate.

This paper has now been slightly reworked and polished up and is currently in the press as a contribution to the Indonesia-based journal Sundalana, which specialises in studies on the Sunda culture of Western Java

major and minor cupmarks as tell-tale signs of megalithic and in general prehistoric dimensions of the shrine of Nagara Padang

     
(Background: In the autumn of 2007, Wim van Binsbergen delivered the key note address at the International Symposium "Expressions of Traditional Wisdom" (Brussels, 28 September 2007). His complete address was later rewritten as a Memoire of the Academie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-mer, in the form of a little book (see yellow cover illustration to the right) entitled:

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) )

For the conference proceedings proper the key note address had to be trimmed to standard article length, and the argument had to be greatly pruned. These conference proceedings have now been published in the Bulletin des Séances de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer (blue cover illustration to the left), including the shortened version of the rewritten key note address:

van Binsbergen, Wim [M.J.], 2009, ‘Expressions of traditional wisdom: What Africa can teach the world today’, Bulletin des Séances de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer / Mededelingen Zittingen Koninklijke Academie voor Overzeese Wetenschappen, 55 (2009-3): 281-305 (click here for the full-text in PDF)

KEYWORDS. — Epistemology; Tradition; Phronesis; Africa; Intercultural.
SUMMARY. — 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 expression of 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 recognized 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
     
Nieuwe dichtbundel gepubliceerd

Als een van de resultaten van de reis naar Thailand, november 2010, schreef Wim van Binsbergen een nieuwe dichtbundel, die inmiddels gepubliceerd is:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, Vanuit een nieuw lichaam van verlichting: Gedichten Thailand 2010, Haarlem: Shikanda (klik op de link voor de PDF versie)

Er is van dit boek ook een uitvoerig geïllustreerde webversie beschikbaar, klik hier

FLAPTEKST: VANUIT EEN NIEUW LICHAAM VAN VERLICHTING: Gedichten Thailand 2010 werd geschreven te Koh Lanta, Zuid-West-Thailand, en Haarlem, in november / december 2010. Het boek schetst in zeven nauw samenhangende lange gedichten de activiteiten, waarnemingen en bewustzijnsprocessen tijdens een reis die de dichter en zijn vrouw ondernamen naar Thailand. De confrontatie met dit door Boeddhisme en koningscultus beheerste land (met als contrast het strandtoerisme van zijn Islamitische Zuiden) voert van aanvankelijke bevreemding tot bewondering, verdieping en ontroering – die ook reflecteert op de liefdesrelatie tussen de beide reizigers. Zoals ook in de bundel Vloed: Een gedicht (2007) vertoont het dichterschap van Wim van Binsbergen ook in dit boek een nauwe band (door aantekeningen ondersteund) met diens wetenschappelijk werk, de laatste jaren gedomineerd door de comparatieve mythologie als een van de sleutels tot het oudste verleden van de mensheid, en tot de prehistorische verhouding tussen Zuid-Oost-Azië en Afrika.

Wim van Binsbergen (Amsterdam, 1947) publiceerde de dichtbundels Klopsignalen, Leeftocht, Vrijgeleide, Herstzondag, Eurydice, Herfstgroei, Vloed en Braambos; de verhalenbundel Zusters, dochters, en de roman Een buik openen. Samen met Ad van Rijsewijk vertaalde hij Okot p’Biteks Lied van Lawino / Lied van Ocol. Hij heeft voorts een wetenschappelijk oeuvre op zijn naam staan als antropoloog, historicus, filosoof en comparatief mytholoog. Veel van zijn werk is niet alleen in druk beschikbaar maar ook op http://www.shikanda.net.

oplaten van Thaise luchtballonen tijdens het Loy Krathongfeest -- onderwerp van een van de gedichten in Wim van Binsbergens nieuwe bundel Vanuit een nieuw lichaam van verlichting


Wim van Binsbergen at the Wat Pho temple, Bangkok, Thailand, 2010

     
Now published:

Tagou, Célestin, 2010, ed., The Dynamics of Conflict, Peace and Development in African Societies: From local to international, Yaounde: Presses des Universités Protestantes d' Afrique; click here for details including order information

This book is based on the 2009 Yaounde conference organised by the book's editor: International Colloquium on The Problematic of Peace and Development in Africa: Balance Sheet and New Stakes in the 3rd Millennium, Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations, Protestant University of Central Africa (UPAC), Yaounde, Republic of Cameroon, 6-9 April 2009. The book's appearance marks the 80th birthday of Professor Johan Galtung, inspiring force and patron of UPAC's Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies. As a member of the Scientific Board of this Centre, Wim van Binsbergen made the following contributions to this new book:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'Preface', in: Tagou, Célestin, 2010, ed., The Dynamics of Conflict, Peace and Development in African Societies: from local to international, Yaounde: Presses des Universités Protestantes d' Afrique, pp. 6-12 (click for PDF)

 

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'Africa’s splendid social technology of reconciliation, and the political sociology of its under-utilisation at the national and international level', in: Tagou, Célestin, 2010, ed., The Dynamics of Conflict, Peace and Development in African Societies: from local to international, Yaounde: Presses des Universités Protestantes d' Afrique, pp. 63-120 (click for PDF)

ABSTRACT. 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.
 
     

Ayutthaya, Thailand


senior Buddhist monk dispensing blessing and beaded bracelet, Bangkok, Thailand


medieval Thai ceramics

In the context of Wim van Binsbergen’s work in progress on pre- and protohistorical connections between South East Asia and Africa (he has worked for some years now on a draft MS provisionally entitled Out of Africa or out of Sundaland), he and his wife Patricia made another self-sponsored trip to South East Asia, this time to Thailand, during most of November 2010. Upon his return, he wrote an extensive report in which the lessons are drawn which Thailand turned put to have for his Sunda project :

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'The relevance of Buddhism and of continental South East Asia for the study of Asian-African transcontinental continuities: Reflections inspired by a recent trip to Thailand' (at: http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/Buddhist_Africa_Thailand.pdf )

ABSTRACT. On the basis of a consideration of selected aspects of Thai culture and history (especially the kingship, musical instruments, and ceramics), against the background of the results (here briefly summarised in Section 2) of the author’s earlier results into transcontinental continuities between Asia and Africa in the field of divination and ecstatic cults, this argument seeks to demonstrate that the study of such continuities now (with the new attention for neo-diffusionist studies in the context of globalisation research) opens up as a promising field of enquiry. After posing preliminary methodological questions, the leading framework that emerges is that of a multidirectional global transcontinental network, such as has gradually developed since the Bronze Age. Having argued the possibility of Hinduist and Buddhist influences in addition to the well-acknowledged Islamic ones, the next question discussed is: what kind of attestations of possibly transcontinental continuities might we expect to find in sub-Saharan Africa. From a long list, and leaving out divination which has already been the subject of the author’s related research, three themes are highlighted out as particularly important: ecstatic cults, kingship, and boat cults. The discussion advances evidence for the Hinduist / Buddhist nature of the state complex centring on Great Zimbabwe, East Central Zimbabwe, as a likely epicentre for the transmission of South-East-Asian-inspired forms of kingship and ecstatic cults. A provisional attempt is made at periodisation of the proposed Hinduist / Buddhist element in sub-Saharan Africa, and the limitations of transcontinental borrowing in protohistorical and historical times is argued by reference to an extensive, originally Neolithic, cultural substratum from which both South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are claimed to have drawn. On the basis of future research advocated here, new insights in transcontinental continuities are to be expected, that throw new light on the extent to which Africa has always been part of global cultural history, and should not be imprisoned in a paradigm that (out of a sympathetic but mistaken loyalty to African identity and originality) seeks to explain things African exclusively by reference to Africa.
Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Ayutthaya, Thailand wooden food bowls from Zambia chariot on mural, Royal Palace, Bangkok. Thailand

Vodun priest, Togo


Royal Palace and temple complex, Bangkok, Thailand


Kings, West Africa

     
Bij uitgeverij Lannoo | Atlas, Tielt / Amsterdam, 2010, verscheen de bloemlezing van Koen Stassijns en Ivo van Strijtem, De mooiste gedichten van de hele wereld: De moderne wereldpoezie in 333 gedichten, waarin opgenomen (pp. 232-233) van Okot p'Bitek, 'Er is geen vaste tijd voor borstvoeding', in de vertaling van Wim van Binsbergen & Ad van Rijsewijk
The Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek
(1931-1982)
     
Now available as Google Book:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1981, Religious change in Zambia: Exploratory studies, London: Kegan Paul International


village shrine with honey container; in the background drums, at sunrise during a name-inheritance rite among the Nkoya people of Zambia, 1977
October 2010
Gerti S.C.M. Hesseling (1946-2009) was a Dutch Africanist legal scholar, and for eight years (1996-2004) the Director of the African Studies Centre, Leiden. She was also Wim van Binsbergen's first PhD student, supervised jointly with the constitutionalist Leo Prakke (public defence 1982). Working closely together throughout the 1980s in the context of the Centre's Department of Political and Historical Studies, Gerti Hesseling and Wim van Binsbergen organised conferences on the African state and published books and papers on African constitutions and on the African state in general. For a commemorative collective volume of this stimulating colleague and life-long friend, Wim van Binsbergen is now contributing a paper entitled:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press, 'Human rights in the traditional legal system of the Nkoya people of Zambia: An exploration in legal anthropology'. Click here for the abstract. (also see Topicalities for November 2006); for the full version, see above, Topicalities for March 2011.

Gerti Hesseling (right) in conversation with Julie Ndaya (who was to receive a PhD under Wim van Binsbergen's supervision in 2008), and Prof. René Devisch, at the Leiden African Studies Centre, April 2004
     
In the first two weeks of October, Wim van Binsbergen participated in three conferences at Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA
1. Variations of Homa: From Vedic to Hindu and Buddhist, Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies, Harvard University

Note on South and East Asian fire ritual, and the Southern African sangoma cult

by Wim van Binsbergen

Wim van Binsbergen's keen interest in this topic was prompted by his extensive recent work on the transcontinental mythology and ritual of fire and of the transformative cycle of elements, pursued in a book draft on the Greek fire god Hephaestus and his alleged Egyptian counterpart Ptah (forthcoming), on the Birth of Fire in Japanese mythology, and on the widespread (including African) distribution of the transformative cycle of elements as an unsuspected, but crucial, background of the Ionian Pre-Socratic philosophers, whose claim to fame as the founding fathers of (Western) philosophy therefore is to be reconsidered (forthcoming). Moreover, the relevance of this study in the context of Wim van Binsbergen's current research projects (particularly his book in preparation Out of Africa or out of Sundaland? ) is as a test case of the extent to which apparent continuities between South or South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa may be attributed to specific cultural transmission between either region, or alternatively derive from a common prehistoric substrate.

A somewhat unexpected benefit from this conference was the confirmation, detailed and on several points, that the Southern African sangoma ecstatic cult, which has been at the focus of Wim van Binsbergen's research and writing since 1988 and of which he is an initiated and active member, is in fact a greatly distorted localising transformation of homa -- as this author has already argued, with less detail, in his chapters on the cult's transcontinental ramifications in his books
Intercultural encounters (2003; click here for the chapter in question ; and here for the book's cumulative bibliography), and Commodification: Things, agency and identities: The Social life of Things revisited (2005, with Peter Geschiere; click here for the chapter in question ; and here for the book's cumulative bibliography ).

The term homa is not used in these papers, yet many details confirm the closeness of homa to the Southern African cult:

  • the meticulous collecting, and piling up in five courses, of specific, rare and precious types of fire wood as the central part of the sangoma shrine especially upon initiation;
In urban Botswana, much cooking and heating is on the basis of firewood (although paraffin, gas and electrical stoves are increasingly important). Most urbanites have no direct access to firewood (the town is surrounded by the extensive and unaccommodating domains of the, originally colonial, Tati Company) and therefore urbanites rely on firewood deliveries by enterprising youngsters using donkey-carts. This firewood however is certainly not what the sangomas use for their rituals. On the eve of every major sangoma ritual, special types of firewood have to be collected, discretely and often under cover of night, from fellow sangomas and other ritual specialists, and intricate rules govern the use of these bundles, indicating a significance far exceeding that of ordinary firewood. Incidentally, a similar pattern governs the (un)availability of sacrificial goats in town -- although goats are indispensible in sangoma sacrifice (the vegetable emphasis of South Asian homa offerings is completely absent here), the acquisition of each goat requires an arduous, time-consuming and often inconclusive journey deep into the countryside, beyond the Tati lands. It is an indication of the transregional, non-local nature of sangoma that its sacrifices and paraphernalia (beads, cloth, divination tablets) usually come from the market, and are not drawn from the sacrificer's own local produce.


photo (c) Barbara Meadows, with thanks

A comparative perspective on the basis of Wim van Binsbergen's work (for details and references search the present website): The striking role of firewood in South and East Asian homa seems to be related to the Indo-European cult of the bundle of twigs as an epiphany of the sacred (the Ancient Iranian barsamen; perhaps also the Italic -- Praeneste -- and Germanic -- cf. Tacitus -- wooden cleromantic apparatus) and of the social order (the Italic fasces). By the same token, a cultic complex centring on fire extends from West Asia (Iranian/ Zoroastrian fire cult) both West (the fire cults of Hephaestus, Hestia/Vesta) and East (India, Mongolia, Japan) -- possibly with fire handling and fire walking as a widespread and possibly very old layer surfacing ubiquitously from sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa to Bali, etc. Of course, fire belongs, with lithic tool making, to humans' oldest technology dating back over a million years, but presumably much of the older symbolism and ritual has been transformed and rechanneled into cults associated with metallurgy as a much more recent invention (Hephaestus is a case in point). On the other hand there is, in homa, an unmistakable reference to the place of wood and fire in a cosmology based on a transformative cycle of elements, widespread, since at least the Bronze Age, from Ancient Graeca Magna to the Indian Ocean, Japan and even South Central Africa (where that cosmology appears to inform local and regional clan terminology). These connections were attributed, a decade ago, to a very old African substrate extending into Asia; later it was proposed that this distribution across three continents may be attributed to a Neolithic or Bronze Age cultural substrate, originating in West Central Asia and provisionally termed 'Pelasgian'. However, it is also conceivable (see below) that the African ramifications of such a cosmology derive (or were added to) from South and East Asian cultural and ritual intrusions into Africa in more recent times (1st to 2nd century of the Common Era).
  • the drinking of blood from the neck of sacrificial animals in their death pangs -- where the sangoma takes over the action which e.g. in Nepali royal homa-based ritual was attributed to the goddess Kali;
  • the sangomas' dressing in black cloaks and
  • calling their god Mwali, of indetermined gender;
  • the regulations for the kind of sacrificial animal / animal skin belonging to each segment (caste) of society (Southern African society does not recognisably have castes but kings and warriors obviously -- as is brought out by van Binsbergen's ethnography: in the sangoma context, the status of warrior was repeatedly imposed upon him -- count as equivalents of Kshatriya), being a literal application of a South Asian ritual prescription for the initiation of Brahmin, Kshatriya etc. as is already quoted in one of the above papers;
  • the application of the Heart sutra;
  • the general structure and social organisation of the sangoma lodge as an ashram

all this leaves little doubt now as to the homa affinities of sangomahood as studied by Wim van Binsbergen in Francistown, Botswana -- although we seem to have here a piecemeal mixture rather than a very specific and systematic borrowing from one concrete and unequivocally identifiable source.

Meanwhile, even though the contemporary forms of sangoma are demonstrably alien to the logic of Kalanga and Tswana culture in Botswana, and are popularly recognised to be so (although they are considered as local, and identified with, among the Southern African Nguni cultures i.e. Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi of South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe -- from one hundred to over a thousand kms removed from Francistown), we must not overlook the very extensive localisation which the (presumably) South Asian material has apparently undergone on African soil. Here it has unmistakably adopted the format, recognisably widespread throughout Bantu-speaking South Central and Southern Africa, of ngoma, i.e. a cult of affliction (a healing cult where the standard route to healing for one suffering is to join the cult and thus to assist in the recruitment of still others) whose rituals are predicated on the dramaturgy of music, dance, and often possession trance. (Ngoma means 'drum, collective musical session, dance' in Bantu languages; could there be a connection with South and East Asian homa? Often San ('Bushmen') healing rites in Southern Africa are considered the prototype of Bantu-speaking ngoma). While there are thus many indications of sangoma having selectively adopted elements of South Asian Buddhist and Hindu homa, sangoma has shown the same capability of selective incorporation vis-à-vis other cultic and ritual elements circulating in the Indian Ocean region. Thus, although sangoma is an ecstatic cult venerating ancestors through possession trance and healing in their name, it has massively adopted the royal (ancestral) cults of South Central and Southern Africa (in which, in its turn, several South Asian elements of royal cults especially royal intronisation, royal orchestras, royal capitals and royal magic have demonstrably been incorporated). Whereas trance divination attributed to ancestral intercession would typically be the sangomas' principal divination technique, in fact in the course of the past century the stark competition over the lucrative therapeutic market in Southern Africa has brought sangomas to adopt forms of cleromantic divination (i.e. with the use of material tokens, lots) that have for centuries belonged to the standard divinatory repertoire of non-Nguni groups in this part of the world (first documented attestation second half of the 16th century CE; oldest archaeological attestation a century later). Nor does this exhaust the extent of transcontinental connections in Southern African divination: outside the domain of sangoma proper, the divination bowls of the Venda of Transvaal and Zimbabwe are highly reminiscent, not only of West African Ifa divination bowls, but also of 1st millennium CE Chinese divination bowls adorned at the rim with 36 zodiacal symbols, largely animal. A South African, Bantu-speaking diviner without any conscious knowledge of Chinese culture even turned out to be aware of the Taoist Lo Shu number symbolism associated with the tortoise's carapace; whereas in general the Southern African herbalist's pharmacopaea shows considerable affinities with the traditional Chinese one. Painstaking transcontinental research has brought to light that the Southern African forms of cleromantic divination and divining bowls are not only strikingly similar (in terminology, astrological affinities, and basic structuring on the basis of 2n different and named divinatory configurations) to divinatory forms in Madagascar, the Comoro Islands, and West Africa -- but that they also go back to a common literate prototype in late 1st-millennium CE Islamic, Abasid Iraq, cilm al-raml ('Sand Science') or khatt al-raml ('Sand Calligraphy'), which in turn display great similarities with the well-known Chinese wisdom oracle of jing (‘I Ching’), and which (as Geomantia, Astrologia terrestris or Ars punctatoria) has also greatly informed West European scholarly and popular magic ever since the Middle Ages).

As a loosely organised healing cult in a competitive therapeutic market which has undergone tremendous changes over the past century, sangoma is almost by definition innovative and idiosyncratic, with each individual practitioner adding his or own personal touches to a widespread common pattern. The sangoma scene in Francistown around 1990 was dominated by three lodges each run by a middle-aged leader: one male from Ndebele/Zimbabwe background, two female (and each other's first cousins i.e. classificatory sisters) from local, Kalanga/Ndebele background; the male leader made his women adepts impersonate royal Nguni ancestors but in divination besides trance and cleromancy he also used a crystal ball which his father, also a sangoma, had received as a gift from a satisfied White client -- the two female leaders boasted common descent from a White grandfather, allegedly from Durban, a South African city which has had a large concentration of Indians since the late 19th century CE, where Gandhi worked as a lawyer for more than twenty years, and where a constant stream of visiting pandits from India must have assured that homa rituals were performed regularly. While this opens the possibility that the homa affinities in sangoma are less than a century old and are only tied to the specific biographies of individual leaders, the close association of sangoma with the widespread Southern African Mwali (/Kali?) cult, the manifestation of homa affinities not only in Francistown but throughout the Southern African sangoma complex, and sangoma's apparent continuity with the Zulu isanuzi court diviners, suggest a time scale of at least a few centuries for the South Asian influences on sangoma.

In such a transcontinental cultural environment as sangoma clearly is (well-documented by Wim van Binsbergen's research over the past two decades) one would not be surprised to find elements of South Asian fire ritual, but one would expect the South Asian elements to appear in fragmentary state, and transformed almost beyond recognition -- as is in fact the case.

On the occasion of the Homa conference, on the morning of 2nd October 2010, a three-hour fire ritual was staged on Harvard Yard, with a senior Nepalese priest (cum American professor) as officiant: Prof. Naresh Bajracarya

On the basis of the printed ritual guidebook edited by one of the great modern masters, the late Pandit Amoghavajra Bajracharya (Kathmandu: Sankhata Press, 2nd ed. 1977?), Professors Bajracarya and Lewis prepared a highly condensed but full description of the Homa ritual performed at Harvard Yard; they graciously permitted the inclusion of their text in the present website: click here for: Notes on the Newar Buddhist Homa Ritual Notes by Naresh Bajracarya and Todd Lewis (2010) / Newar Buddhist Homa: The Order of the Sahasra Ahuti Ritual



In the Nepalese Buddhist homa ritual as performed at Harvard Yard. on the lawn in front of the Harvard Sciences Building, the central shrine is a simple mandala temporarily constructed out of industrial concrete bricks, bound together with rope, the crevisses smeared over with cement, and the ensemble adorned with red and yellow powdered lines and little flags. The priest sits East of this structure, in front of a small burner, whose flame will ultimately be transferred to the mandala. Left and right of the priest and one or two metres West of the mandala (where an altar has been erected covered with red cloth) large amounts of offerings are piled up, to be committed to the flames by the priest at strictly prescribed moments in the ritual. The standard exegesis is that the fire god Agni, by consuming the offerings, conveys these offerings from the humans to specific gods addressed in the ritual (cf. Ancient Greek knisê, Arabic/Islamic baraka); however, in view of the later subjugation of all earlier gods to the Buddha hence Agni's demotion to subaltern status, it cannot be ruled out that in much earlier, pre-Buddhist phases of the fire cult, the fire god himself was considered the principal object of the offerings. Continuous recitation of strictly prescribed texts is another of the priest's duties throughout the ritual. The priest (dressed in a white garment with red and yellow shoulder cape, and a golden headdress at the height of the ritual) is assisted by an acolyte in traditional Nepali dress.


Early stages of the ritual


part of the collection of firewood, and other paraphernalia


Chinese characters are woven into the officiant's garment


More or less traditionally dressed people with Nepali connections form the ritual audience, seated North of the mandala in the first phases of the ritual, and South in the final phase, when they are holding a sacred thread that links them, finally to step forth one by one in order to present their financial offering (in the order of 5 to 10 US$ each) and receive the priest's blessing, made visible by a sacrificial red dot in their face the size of the priest's fingertip, and by a sacrificial flower to be stuck behind the ear. Behind this inner circle, an outer ring of onlookers was formed, consisting of conference participants and passers-by -- some of whom also partook of the final blessing. Towards the middle of the ritual, the original brick mandala is built up with additional loose bricks and assorted prescribed types of firewood, to be kindled from the priest's small burner. It is here that the sacrifices are to be committed to the fire.


Two ritual participants lift a heavy piece of firewood onto the burning mandala; note the modern Harvard architecture and sun panels in the background


Ritual participants and acolyte near the end of the ritual; note the sacred thread


Towards the end of the ritual, the acolyte touches all ritual participants with the fire thongs


Kneeling for the priest's blessing towards the end of the ritual


At the end of the ritual, all firewood has been duly consumed; note the small burner protected from the wind by upright bricks, just in front of the priest


After the ritual, the officiant Prof. Naresh Bajracarya assumes the role of modern scholar and explains the ritual's details during the homa conference


below: compare the homa priest's headdess (with five petal-like or flamelike segments, each of which carries the image of a major Vedic/Hindu/Buddhist god), with the headdress of the senior sangoma Mmashakayile in Francistown, 1989; click here for a photo essay on Francistown sangoma
headdress worn during the height of the homa ritual at Harvard Yard, 2010 Mmashakayile posing in state (1989) the male ancestors' shrine at the sangoma lodge in the outlying village of Matshelegabedi, 20 km from Francistown, Botswana, 1991. The construction is rationalised as a platform on which to present sacrificial meat, and has few if any counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa
2. Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on Historical Comparative Mythology, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

a welcome re-assessment of current specialist views of long-range connections in mythology, genetics and linguistics

click here for a selective and critical reflection of this conference:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, ‘Giving oneself air(s): The 2010 Radcliffe exploratory seminar on Comparative Mythology at Harvard’

Michael Witzel, one of the world's leading Sankritists, President of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, and convenor of the three Harvard conferences (among others) in October 2010
3. The 4th Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM), location: GCIS South, Harvard University, Cambridge (Mass.), USA. Wim van Binsbergen (one of IACM's directors) will present a paper entitled:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, The heroes in Flood myths worldwide; Seeking to capture prehistoric modes of thought by means of quantitative contents analysis' (70 pp.), paper delivered at the 4th Annual Meeting, International Association for Comparative Mythology, Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA), USA, 8-9 October 2010 (click here for PDF)

On this occasion, Eric Venbrux and Wim van Binsbergen will launch their volume New Perspectives on Myth (the proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting IACM, 2008), which was published a few weeks earlier (see below).

flood hero (according to other specialists the water god Ea) on a Ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seal

 
September 2010
     

While the paper highlights especially the bee part of the reed-and-bee complex of the Ancient Egyptian royal titulature as (at least, that is what my argument claims) echoed in modern South Central Africa, this photograph shows King Kahare Kabambi of the Mashasha Nkoya, Kaoma district, Zambia, 1977, holding a reed-mat as emphatic sign of historical identity. His explicit reference was that when the expanding Luyi ousted the Mashasha (the name has no conscious reed-mat connotations but refers to sour beer) from the Zambezi flood-plain, they carried their reed-mats with them -- an enigmatic action, for reed for new mats can be found everywhere in Western Zambia; however, my hypothesis is that these mats were mobile coffins, containing the bodies of royal ancestors.

A second, truncated instalment of Wim van Binsbergen's views on links between Ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa is to be published in i-Medjat 5:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'A reed-and-bee complex?”: Excerpt from Wim van Binsbergen, “The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies as seen from the perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa’, 2nd Annual Conference International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August 2008.”, i-Medjat: Papyrus 'electronique des Ankhou: Revue caribéenne pluridisciplinaire éditée par l’Unité de Recherche-Action Guadeloupe (UNIRAG), 5, septembre 2010: p. 7-8; click here for PDF

and click here for the original 2008 conference paper

reed-mat burial was practiced in Early Dynastic Egypt; photograph of a mat burial from: Goneim, M. Zakaria, 1956, The Lost Pyramid, New York: Rinehart
August 2010

Eric Venbrux and Wim van Binsbergen at the Tiananmen
Square, Beijing, People's Republic of China, 2006; note
the setting sun in the background

Now published:

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux, eds, New Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, 465 pp, indexes, 33 figures, 9 tables, ISBN 978-90-78382-07-2

BLURB:
The Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM) was held at the former convent of Soeterbeeck near the small medieval town of Ravenstein in the Netherlands on 19-21 August 2008. This volume contains the proceedings of that conference. The 19 chapters are divided over five parts: an Introduction offering a report of the conference, a section on The Mythology of Death and Dying, another on Mythological Continuities between Africa and Other Continents, a section on Theoretical and Methodological Advances, and a final one on Work-in-Progress. This volume demonstrates that the field of comparative mythology is rapidly and convincingly shedding its sometime connotations of over-specialised antiquarian scholarship, to become (in close col-laboration with a wide range of auxiliary fields – from genetics to linguistics, ethnography, archaeology, statistics, and classics) an exciting, rapidly expanding domain of theoretical and methodological reflection, and an ever widening window on humankind’s remoter cultural history. While the field increasingly becomes transcontinental not only in subject matter but also in scholarly participation, new growth points can be discerned around death as a mythical domain, and around the understanding of Africa’s place in the wider cultural history of humankind as a whole.
The editors. WIM VAN BINSBERGEN is Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and Professor of Intercultural Philosophy, Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. ERIC VENBRUX is Professor of Religious Anthropology in the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Both are founding members of the International Association for Comparative Mythology

click here for the web-based contents of this book, and to the PIP-TraCS / Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies series in which it appears as No. 5

This book's contents include the following:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Venbrux, Eric, 2010, 'Preface', 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, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, p. 5

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Venbrux, Eric, 2010, 'Introduction: The Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, the Netherlands, August 19-21, 2008', in: eds, 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, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, pp. 17-21

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: General theoretical models, and detailed comparative discussion of the case of Nkoya mythology from 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, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, pp. 143-223

for the last paper the following abstract is available:

 
Abstract. This paper looks at mythological continuities between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the Old World – not so much North Africa, but Eurasia. This is a remarkably unusual perspective in the field of comparative mythology: the othering and exclusion of Africa and Africans have been an inveterate though obsolescent feature of North Atlantic scholarship. The approach in this paper is greatly inspired by Michael Witzel’s recent work in comparative mythology, but takes exception at his Laurasian / Gondwana distinction, which is predicated on absolute Eurasian / African discontinuity. Instead, the present argument seeks to include sub-Saharan Africa in the standard comparative mythology as applied to the rest of the world. For this purpose a two-stage argument is deployed. Since the article is essentially a review of several decades of the author’s research, it risks to be unusually auto-referential, for which apologies are hereby offered. First, twentieth-century interpretative schemas are discussed that stipulate mythological continuity instead of separation between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa: Frobenius’ South Erythraean model; cultural diffusion from Egypt; combined cultural and demic diffusion from sub-Saharan Africa shaping Egyptian and subsequently Greek mythology (Afrocentrism, Bernal’s Black Athena thesis). Then, as background for the latest generation of models, indications for transcontinental continuities are discussed from the fields of long-range linguistics (concentrating on Starostin’s *Borean hypothesis, and adducing new material concerning the place of Niger-Congo > Bantu in the *Borean schema), and molecular genetics: the Out-of-Africa hypothesis, and the Back-into-Africa hypothesis. This sets the scene for a discussion of the author’s Aggregative Diachronic Model of World Mythology, suggesting that ‘Pandora’s Box’ (the cultural heritage with which Anatomically Modern Humans left Africa from 80 ka BP on) contained a few identifiable basic mythological motifs, which were subsequently developed, transformed and innovated in Asia, after which the results where fed back into Africa in the Back-into-Africa movement – the entire process resulting in considerable African-Eurasian continuity. After a discussion, in regard of the last few millennia, of the author’s Pelasgian Model (proposing cultural including mythological transmission from Western Asia / the Mediterranean by the ‘cross-model’ mechanism, i.e. in all four directions – Western Europe; Northern Europe; the Eurasian Steppe to South, East and South Asia; and sub-Saharan Africa – from the Late Bronze Age onward), the transition to the second stage of the argument is formed by an examination of the mythology of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa, in the light of the Aarne-Thompson classification; this again yields results suggestive of considerable African-Eurasian continuity. This means that the author’s1992 analysis of Nkoya mythology (in his book Tears of Rain) in terms of local protohistory, may no longer be tenable. Contamination by recent Islamic and Christian proselytisation is discussed and ruled out as a major factor in African-Eurasian mythological continuities. To clinch the argument in favour of massive African-Eurasian mythological continuities, 26 Nkoya mythemes are considered in detail against the fully referenced background of their global correspondences. A high degree of African-Eurasian mythological continuity is the argument’s main, theoretically and empirically grounded, conclusion. While this highlights overall African-Eurasian cultural connections, it particularly lends support to the Pelasgian hypothesis, and throws in relief unsuspected but close and multiplex affinities between a South Central African kingship, and the Eurasian Steppe.
 
July 2010
In addition to his membership of the Advisory Editorial Board of the Caribbean Journal of Philosophy, Wim van Binsbergen now joins the Editorial Board of Culture and Dialogue, a peer reviewed semi-annual journal to be launched in Winter 2010; contracting publisher: Airiti Press Inc., Taipei, Editor-in-Chief: Gerald Cipriani; click here for the circular introducing that new journal
     
In this period, the following book went to the press:

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen, 2011, ed., Black Athena comes of age: Towards a constructive reassessment, Berlin - Münster - Wien - Zürich-London: LIT, 368 pp.

for details, see above under August 2011, when the book was published

Mediterranean cameo representing the goddess
Athena, dating from the early Common Era, and
found in Meroe, N. Sudan

June 2010
Wim M.J. van Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux's collective volume: New Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008

was one of the first two volumes to be published in the new series recently established by Wim van Binsbergen in association with Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue de Philosophie Africaine, and the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies (PIP-TraCS)

click here for details on this new series, its format, recent and imminent volumes, how to order them, and how to submit proposed contributions

     

Acholi spiked wheel trap, N. Uganda


Sahara rock painting with spoke-wheeled chariot


pre-dynastic Egyptian fresco arguably showing a spiked-wheel trap

Wim van Binsbergen recently formulated the 'Pelasgian hypothesis' as a useful tool to account for transcontinental continuities throughout the Old World from the mid-Holocene onward. A major inspiration in this has been his re-analysis of the global distribution of the so-called spiked-wheel trap, a humble hunting device found in Central Asia, the Mediterranean, and all over Africa. The article he drafted on this topic in 2008-2009 is now ready to go to the press. A preprint is offered here:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., n.d. [ 2010], 'The spiked wheel trap as a cultural index fossil in African prehistory: An exercise in global distribution analysis based on Lindblom’s 1935 data' (pre-publication version; click for PDF)

© 2010 Wim van Binsbergen

ABSTRACT. Reading geographical distribution patterns and turning them into models of historical reconstruction of diffusion, is not only a work of science, but also a fine art, in which the experience gathered in the previous analysis of similar or complementary distributions contributes considerably to our perception and interpretation. In the present argument, the global distribution of one particular item of material culture will serve as an example of such strategies in distributional analysis: the spiked wheel trap, a common hunting device in Africa and parts of Eurasia, but apparently not attested anywhere else in the world. Africa and Africans are commonly depicted as totally different from the rest of the Old World. Much of the author’s work over the past two decades has been aimed at combating this misconception. The distribution pattern of the spiked 1928 / 1935) is so pertinent to this question, that this implement may serve as an ‘the e‘hypothesis localised origin in the Neolithic Extendnd of the present argument. The far greater incidence on African soil, linked with the Afrocentrist wheel trap (first analysed by Lindblom in index fossil’ in African prehistory, bringing out the merits of the Pelasgian ’ which the present author has recently advanced, and which is summarised by hypothesis according to which major model: origin, would tempt us to consider the spiked wheel (a) a rathered Fertile Crescent (by which is meant the extended region stretching from the developments in global cultural history have an African trap as an African invention which gradually trickled into Eurasia. However, this paper argues the opposite
then still fertile Sahara to China), probably in Central Asia;
(b) followed by spread, in the wake of the general diffusion of pastoral and agricultural technologies but particularly intensified with the rise of horse-riding and chariot technologies – both being technological innovations emerging in Central Asia c. 6 ka BP and 4 ka BP, respectively;
(c) not only were these pastoral technologies responsible for cultural spread and proto-globalising homogenisation of the Eurasian Steppe Belt from Anatolia to the Pacific – from the Late Bronze Age onward they also succeeded in making inroads into sub-Saharan Africa, both along the Nile valley and along Sahara dessert routes (where rock art representations of chariots abound from the Late Bronze Age on).
Sparsely inhabited by hunter-gatherers that lacked both these specific formal cultural systems and the military technology that privileged their owners, the whole of sub-Saharan Africa was available for expansion of these new items. Hence their preponderance there in historical times, which however is to be interpreted in terms, not of origin, but of the occupation of an empty niche of cultural ecology. In the last two to three millennia, African cultures in sub-Saharan Africa consolidated themselves as a result of the interaction between Palaeo-African populations and their cultural traits, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, inputs from outside Africa, including those from the Pelasgian realm of West Asia and the Mediterranean. The spiked wheel trap, however insignificant in itself, is an index fossil of the Pelasgian side of this process. The spiked wheel trap shares this position with a few other formal cultural systems, such as mankala, geomantic divination, and the belief in a unilateral mythical being, whose similar distributions we examine as a stepping-stone towards a summary presentation of the Pelasgian hypothesis.

key words: Pelasgian hypothesis; Hamitic hypothesis; Borean hypothesis; Out of Africa hypothesis; Back-into-Africa hypothesis; spiked wheel trap; distributional analysis; genetic, linguistic and cultural continuity Africa-Eurasia; mankala; geomantic divination; unilateral mythical being

A spiked-wheel trap from the Amur region, S.E. Siberia


global distribution and proposed diffusion of the spiked-wheel trap
as argued in the paper -- revealing the Primary Pelasgian realm and the Secondary Pelasgian realm


spiked-wheel trap from Libya

May 2010

Stephanus Djunatan (left) conducting an interview with shrine guardians in the prayer hall of their most senior exponent, at the village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Java (2007)

Wim van Binsbergen (left), Stephanus Djunatan (right) and a colleague during a slamatan (sacrificial collective meal) that forms part of pilgrimage at the shrine of Nagara Padang (2010) -- note the pilgrim's uniform; click here for full report

Diagram representing the proposed reconstructed history ofthe devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, argued to go back to the Upper Paleolithic

The Asia Africa Conference Museum, home of the 1955 Bandung conference of world-historical significance; click here for photo essay highlighting the African involvement

From 28 April to 12 May 2010 Wim van Binsbergen visited Bandung, Indonesia, in order to finalise the supervision (jointly with Prof. Bambang Sugiharto of the Department of Philosophy, Catholic University Bandung (UNPAR), and Prof. Robert Wessing of The Hague, Netherlands) of Stephanus Djunatan's PhD thesis in philosophy. This thesis consists of the elaboration of The Principle of Affirmation dealing -- on the spur of an African methodological and theoretical inspiration, notably the work of the lamented Odera Oruka -- with a West Javanese mountaineous pilgrimage complex and its associated worldview, Taoism, modern Japanese philosophy, Deleuze and Ricoeur; the thesis is to be defended before Erasmus University, Rotterdam, which also sponsors this trip

The trip coincided with study days of the Department of Philosophy (c. 40 students and nearly a dozen members of staff) at the devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Bandung, which plays a major role in Mr Djunatan's thesis. Having visited the shrine in 2007 and having provisionally reported on it, Wim van Binsbergen took the opportunity to renew the acquaintance and see the students and staff in action there. At the request of the staff members involved, he wrote a lavishly illustrated report, available here under the following title:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'The devotional mountain shrine of Nagara Padang, village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Bandung, Java, Indonesia: Comparative historical and theoretical reflections with implications for the student research training project organised at the site by the Catholic University Bandung’s Department of Philosophy', 34 pp., numerous figures

Abstract. The devotional shrine of Nagara Padang, village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West Bandung, Indonesia, plays a central role in the research of the author’s PhD candidate Mr Stephanus Djunatan, a lecturer of philosophy at the Parahyangan Catholic University (UNPAR), Bandung, who is scheduled to publicly defend his PhD thesis before the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in February 2011. The author himself returned to the shrine in 2010, three years after his first visit, and this time in the context of a massive student research training project supervised by c. 10 UNPAR lecturers including Mr Djunatan. Leaning heavily on the latter’s work, the author’s argument briefly describes the main features of the shrine and of a large collective pilgrimage there starting from the village of Rawabogo. In a more original vein, the argument highlights the syncretistic signature of the shrine’s cult (apparently a mixture of Islamic, Hinduist, Buddhist and animistic elements, going back to the first half of the second millennium CE). Parallels are drawn not only with the Borobudur devotional shrine of Central Java, but also with North Africa (where the author has studied, since 1967, shrine cults in the context of popular Islam) and with sub-Saharan Africa (where in at least three places, as widely apart as Malawi, Cameroon and Uganda, somewhat similar, symbolically and cultically charged rock formations may be found, especially associated with the idea of the emergence of the first people from the earth or their descent from heaven). The possibility of an extreme antiquity for the Nagara Padang site as a cult centre is further suggested by its reminiscences of Upper Paleolithic initiatory rituals of spiritual (re-)birth, with the novice having to press oneself through a narrow rock crevice. The presence of at least one menhir and of numerous cupmarks on the top of the site suggests continuity with the widespread Indonesian megalithic complex, with contested affinities throughout South East and East Asia, and the rest of the Old World – and Bronze Age dating. These discussions are supported by numerous illustrations. Against the background of a selection of the scholarly literature the anthropological theory of shrine cults (also called regional cults) is presented in a nutshell – with emphasis on Victor Turner’s concept of communitas. This finaly allows the author to comment, as requested by the organisers, on the considerable merits of the student research training project.

Bandung was the home of the 1955 Asia Africa Conference, where world history was made -- birth of the Non-Allied Movement, and (in the Conference Declaration) the sign for the final phase of docolonisation in Africa. The original conference hall was turned into a Museum, and a photo essay highlighting African involvement reports on a visit to that historic place:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'The African presence at the Bandung, Indonesia, 1955 Asia Africa conference, and its aftermath: Photo essay', at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/bandung_conference/bandung2.htm

As a guest of the Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, Wim van Binsbergen presented the following seminar:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'The crisis of meaning under conditions of globalisation, urbanisation and commoditification, and the reconsideration of traditional wisdom approaches as a possible way out -- with special attention to Africa and Indonesia today', the Department of Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic University Bandung, Monday 10 May 2010, 16.00-17.00 hrs

while being orally adapted to the specific Bandung situation at hand, this seminar largely formed a truncated version of:

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
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.

April 2010
     
Establishment of a new website devoted to Wim van Binsbergen's research on traditional religion, housing, urban culture and globalisation in Francistown, Botswana (1988-2005)

This was occasion for the re-issue, in digital form (on this new webpage) of three 1989 progress reports (on Francistown self-help housing, on the Francistown squatter area PWD, and on Kalanga bibliography), of the Research project: 'The growth of urban society in Francistown', Francistown: African Studies Centre University of Leiden / Applied Research Unit Ministry of Local Government and Lands Republic of Botswana

 
 

Doornbos, Martin R., & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., (in press), Researching power and identity in African state formation, (500 pp.) -- this co-authored book was accepted for publication by UNISA [ University of South Africa ] Press, Pretoria, South Africa, and is to appear in 2011

 

Professors Matsumura, Berezhkin, van Binsbergen and others at the 2nd Annual Meeting of the IACM, Ravenstein, the Netherlands, 2008

Dr Kazuo Matsumura, associate professor at Tenri University, Tokyo, and one of the Directors of the International Association of Comparative Mythology (IACM), recently (2010) published a book in Japanese entitled Shinwa-Shiko (Mythical Thinking, 604+51 pp.): a collection of 37 of his papers on comparative mythology. The first paper is "The Present State and Future of Comparative Mythology: World Mythology" (likewise in Japanese), seeking to introduce Japanese researchers to the recent work of four other prominent comparative mythologists, notably Steve Farmer, Yuri Berezhkin, Michael Witzel, and Wim van Binsbergen; click here for the Japanese fulltext of this article.
Shinwa-Shiko,
by Kazuo Matsumura


Kazuo Matsumura

 
While the 2009 (XXIII) and 2010 (XXIV) volumes of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie are now being prepared for the press so as to come out before Summer 2010, intensive preparations are being made for volume 2011 (XXV). Among the various options open we can mention the following: a volume entirely devoted to the seminal work of the Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga -- which if it could be realised would be one of the three major publications to come out of the Eboussi project which has been running for the last few years, with extensive participation of Cameroonian scholars, and further involvement of such prominent specialists as Prof. Procesi (Roma), Prof. Kasereka and Prof. Mudimbe (USA) -- , the latter a member of the Quest Advisory Editorial Board. The participants in this project are all of them professionals, most of them philosophers. This work possibly envisaged in the Quest context would distinguish itself from two other recent publications on Eboussi. The first one published in Paris, 2009, was a volume of Mélanges in his honour, under the editorship of Ambroise Kom; the second, intended to be published by Presence Africaine (in principle), will include the proceedings of the 'Journées Eboussi' which were organized at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, in the summer of 2009. These various hommages celebrate Eboussi as one of the most original and influential minds of modern Africa.  

Fabien Eboussi Boulaga

 
The Belgian city of Genk has a jumelage with the Botswana city of Francistown. As a specialist on Francistown, Wim van Binsbergen has been invited to advise the Municipality of Genk on socio-cultural historical background of this Botswana boom town, and to participate in a medical panel meeting to be held in Genk, Belgium, 19-20 April, 2010
to the left, click the operating triangle to watch a superb short movie bringing out, against the homely theme of an ordinary mature woman killing and preparing a cock for dinner, many of the contradictions of modern Francistown life, between (youthfully revived) dust-coloured tradition -- and glossy, gaudy globalisation: "Ready", a 2004 (2008 re-edit) video by Eva Heldmann, intercutting a ballroom dancing competition in Francistown, Botswana, the Mogwana Dancers in Gaborone, Botswana, and more. The quality of the film allows full-screen playing, by activating the square of four arrows bottom right in the video screen. Although the traditional dancers, like the ballroom ones, clearly dress up for the occasion and (as cynical culture critics would be quick to point out) present some sort of performative maskerade, yet the young girl's dance solo at the end has all the vigour and the redemptive beauty of historic African culture through the ages -- as I am qualified to say, as a certified Botswana sangoma, i.e. traditional therapeutic and divinatory dancer, myself

After the movie Ready, take the opportunity of sampling a few more videos of Botswana life, by clicking on the upward arrow extreme right at the bottom of the video screen
In April 2010 bezocht Wim van Binsbergen de stad Genk op uitnodiging van de gemeente Genk, en hield daar een tweetal voordrachten:

1. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'De verhouding tussen traditionele en moderne biomedische geneeskunst in Afrika, met bijzondere nadruk op Francistown', lezing in het kader ''Een avond over gezondheidszorg', in de grote gehoorzaal van het Ziekenhuis Oost Limburg (Z.O.L.) te Genk, maandag 19 april 2010, 20.00-23.00 uur.

De andere bijdragen in dit kader waren van Dr Jean-Louis Lamboray en Dr Rituu Nanda, AIDS specialisten; Dr Ombelet (fertiliteitsspecialist / gynaecoloog), en enige verpleegkunde studenten die onlangs een stage hadden gedaan in Francistown. Wim van Binsbergens bijdrage kwam sterk overeen met die welke hij in oktober 2009 voor studenten te Utrecht gehouden heeft, klik hier om deze te openen

2. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'De stad Francistown in Noord Oost Botswana, geschetst in haar sociaal-historische ontwikkeling: Presentatie voor de Gemeentelijke Stuurgroep Jumelage Genk / Francistown, Gemeentehuis, Genk (België)', dinsdag 20 april 2010, 11.00-13.30 uur; klik hier om deze presentatie te openen

(sommige illustraties nemen nogal veel tijd om te laden, maar de links zijn in orde -- geduld dus)

Francistown: modern formal structures in the 'dustbowl full of sand' (a colonial stereotype for Botswana)

heraldic sign of the city of Genk

March 2010
In March 2010, Wim van Binsbergen and his wife Patricia went on an extensive journey through South East Asia (Sarawak and Sabah as parts of Malaysian Borneo; and Bali and the Gili Islands, Lombok, Indonesia). This resulted in a preliminary report highlighting selected aspects of the trip:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'March 2010: Extensive journey through South East Asia' (at: http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/Borneo_Bali_2010_final.pdf )

(notes concerning genetic and cultural relations between South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the rival Sunda and Pelasgian hypotheses, details of the Niah Cave archaeological site and its significance, glimpses of Iban and Chinese components of Malaysian Borneo society and its colonial background, reflections on Balinese culture in the face of globalisation, Balinese New Year (Nyepi), initial fieldwork on Balinese religion, as well as further reflections on the global distribution and interconnectedness of ecstatic cults, shrine cults, fire cults, and of mankala boardgames).

Subsequently, my report was rewritten with exclusive emphasis on the Sunda hypothesis, and -- after re-assessing the genetic evidence -- totally different, and this time affirmative, conclusions concerning the Oppenheimer / Tauchmann hypotheses of extensive South and South East Asian demographic impact on sub-Saharan Africa in protohistoric times:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010, 'South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa: Transcontinental explorations inspired by an Africanist’s recent trip to South East Asia' (at: http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/Borneo_Bali_2010_Tauchmann.pdf)

December 2009-March 2010
UNIVERSITE PROTESTANTE PROTESTANT UNIVERSITY
D’AFRIQUE CENTRALE (UPAC) OF CENTRAL AFRICA (PUCA)

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

After the successful completion of this International Colloquium in May 2009, the convenor, Jr Prof. Celestin Tagou, managed to have all the papers revised and submitted within half a year, and the conference book is now ready to go to the printer's. Wim van Binsbergen has been honoured to advise on the editorial process, and to contribute a Foreword to this splendid and timely collection
Jr Prof. Celestin Tagou, UPAC

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.

 
current year: 2010 (begins above this line; the closer to the top of the page, the nearer to 2011); click here for the years 2008-2009

on this page only current topicalities from the year 2010- 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 2008-2009; 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: 17-10-2014 14:42:01