Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland: Religion, Art, Script, Time, Urbanism, Trade and Empire

FdA – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit LeidenHeritage of Indigenous People

L'homme et l'eau dans le bassin du lac Tchad = Man and water in the lake Chad basin

The region of Lake Chad is one of the earliest and most important focusses of cattle-breeding in the Sudanic savanna zone. Today, the area is inhabited by three pastoral groups, the Buduma (Yedina), the Fulbe (Fulani) and the Shuwa Arabs, who possess different breeds of cattle. The Buduma are the old-established population, and their animals have extremely well been adapted to their aquatic habitat. Fulbe nomads infiltrated the region from the west from the 13th century onwards, and Shuwa Arabs reached the plains west of the lake in the 18th century, after they had adopted cattle-breeding from the Fulbe in the eastern Sudanic zone. Among the Fulbe a type of narrative was preserved which can be labelled the "cattle-water mythologem". A wide-spread version reports about a water-spirit (djinn) who impregnated a woman called Bajomanga and became the ancestor of the Bororo, the nomadic Fulbe. By that time cattle used to live in the water like hippopotami. The djinn, by employing magical practices, made the cattle come out of the water and presented them to his human sons after he had taught them all necessary techniques of herding and breeding. The Shuwa adopted the basic pattern of this myth from the Fulbe, but they modified the topic according to their specific historical and environmental experiences. It can be concluded that among pastoralists of the Chad basin the "cow-water mythologem" is thus to be regarded as a reflection of real incidents and a core element of their cultural identity. (Résumé d'auteur

Ethnicity, belonging and identity among the Eastern Gurage of Ethiopia

In this paper, I will analyse a case of ethnic transformation in post-1991 Ethiopia based on an ethnographic study of the Eastern Gurage. The case represents an ethnic setting where the conventional conceptualization of ethnicity in terms of a notion of origin undermines the diversities expressed in various forms of category and boundary formations. The ethnic setting does not also fall into, but combines, the commonplace dichotomization of primordialist versus constructivist notion of ethnicity. Not only by taking Barth’s (1969) formalist anthropological conception of ethnicity as boundary formation, but also suggesting my own analytical distinction, I will attempt to account for the various forms of ethnicities particularly those based on clanship, locality, Islam and state’s categorization. In this regard, I have introduced a distinction between the concepts of identity and belonging in order to explain the different forms of social and political classifications, ideologies and power relationships that are often treated as implying a single phenomenon, i.e. identity formation

Sahelian pastoralism from the perspective of variants associated with lactase persistence.

International audienceArcheological evidence shows that first nomadic pastoralists came to the African Sahel from northeastern Sahara, where milking is reported by ~7.5 ka. A second wave of pastoralists arrived with the expansion of Arabic tribes in 7th-14th century CE. All Sahelian pastoralists depend on milk production but genetic diversity underlying their lactase persistence (LP) is poorly understood