in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory
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Ancient models of
thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory |
Ancient models of thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory, examined by an Africanist anthropologist turned intercultural philosopher. Topics include extensive long-range comparative / historical analyses of myths especially African creation myths; the anthropological and philosophical theory of myth; the comparative historical analysis of geomantic divination and mankala board-games; a theoretical model of magic in Ancient Mesopotamia; an archaeoastronomical analysis of cupmarks as star maps and as a possible origin of mankala board-games -- stating the case for the view that Neandertals made stellar maps; and a detailed analysis of animal symbolism (especially leopard-related symbolism) across three continents and five millennia
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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 |
| proceed to Topicalities: an up-to-date weblog of Wim van Binsbergen's current and imminent research and publications since 2002 |
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| NOTE TO SITE VISITOR: in view of Wim van Binsbergen's considerable productivity and the large investments he has to make into PhD research under his direction, it has become impractical to record all relevant publications and project in the present page onm 'Ancient Models of Thought'. More and more, the reporting on current and imminent publications and research has been relegated to Wim van Binsbergen's Topicalities weblog, which has offered a month-by-month overview since 2002. For post-2007 topics related to the present webpage, see: Topicalities, in the Shikanda.net portal | ||||
| 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 |
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| AS AN AFRICANIST, WIM VAN
BINSBERGEN'S INCREASING INVOLVEMENT IN COMPARATIVE
MYTHOLOGY BROUGHT HOME TO HIM THE FACT THAT THE
MARGINALISATION OF AFRICA WAS ALSO MANIFEST IN THAT
APPARENTLY NEUTRAL AND COSMOPOLITAN SUB-DISCIPLINE; MANY
OF HIS PAPERS IN THIS FIELD HAVE TRIED TO REMEDY THIS
REGRETTABLE SITUATION. In this connection he compiled the
following table, which systematically applies the
conceptual apparatus of his Aggregative Diachronic Model
for Global Mythology both to Africa and to the
mythologies of the other continents, bringing out a most
remarkable, and largely ignored, continuity
(Note: this table is not in portrait but in landscape format; your PDF reader has a button to rotate the page 90 degrees clockwise, in order to allow you to read the table without difficulty)
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| APPLYING
COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY TO AFRICAN PRE- AND PROTOHISTORY:
THE SUNDA THESIS AND SOUTH EAST ASIAN INFLUENCE ON
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA As one of the results of Wim van Binsbergen's intensive work on comparative mythology, the following conference paper was proposed for the 1st Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, of which Wim van Binsbergen had become (Beijing 2006) one of the founders and directors: meanwhile this proposal has been worked out into a fully-fledged conference presentation (PowerPoint): and has been published in the journal Cosmos (Edinburgh): van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., with the collaboration of Mark Isaak, 2008, ‘Transcontinental mythological patterns in prehistory: A multivariate contents analysis of flood myths worldwide challenges Oppenheimer’s claim that the core mythologies of the Ancient Near East and the Bible originate from early Holocene South East Asia’, Cosmos: The Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society), 23 (2007): 29-80, fulltext at: http://shikanda.net/ancient_models/Binsbergen_Edinburgh_2007_%20for_Cosmos.pdf .
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| AN AFRICANIST'S ITINERARY OF LONG-RANGE RESEARCH, 1968-2007. While rewriting my paper: 'Further steps towards an aggregative diachronic approach to world mythology, starting from the African continent', read at the International Conference on Comparative Mythology, organized by Peking University (Research Institute of Sanskrit Manuscripts & Buddhist Literature) and the Mythology Project, Asia Center, Harvard University (Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies), May 10-14, 2006, at Peking University, Beijing, China (convenors Professors Duan Qing and Michael Witzel) -- I feel the need (as a form of theoretical, methodological and empirical justification) to spell out the research itinerary that has led me, from my first anthropological and historical fieldwork in 1968, to my present concentration on long-range studies, involving connections across many thousands of years, and across and between entire continents. Hence this special web paper, that is ultimately intended as draft for a book in which I collect some of the intermediate results over the years which so far have not yet been published except on the Internet: | ||||
| AFTER THE 2005 KYOTO
PAPER, A FURTHER REFINEMENT AND RETHINKING OF THE
AGGREGATIVE DIACHRONIC MODEL OF GLOBAL MYTHOLOGY:
the above link only leads to the pre-conference paper proposal; meanwhile also the actual conference paper has become available: the paper has also been written out for publication, now lon delayed, by the convenors; see:
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| AN INITIAL PERSPECTIVE ON TRANSCONTINENTAL CULTURAL AND MYTHICAL CONTINUITY: at long last: Global bee flight, a 500-page book drafted in 1998-2001 and announced as a professionally Africanist contribution to the Black Athena debate, never made it into print, and contrary to the author's habits not even to the Internet, for a number of reasons now, in the second half of the 2000-2010 decade, gradually being overcome. Find here, as a first instalment, the 1998 version of chapter 5, lavishly ammended with 2006 Postscripts in the light of the author's intellectual progress since 1998: his increasing acquaintance with Ancient Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, and (as a background throwing the particular Africanist and Egyptological argument into relief) his increasingly successful long-range comparative historical research into Old World symbolism, myth and cultural history, going further and further back in time and now reaching the pre-out of Africa phase of Anatomically Modern Humans (before 140,000 Before Present). | ||||
| THEORETICAL COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY AS A KEY TO PREHISTORIC AND PROTOHISTORIC IMAGERY AND ICONOGRAPHY. As Wim van Binsbergen's theoretical approach to the global history of mythology took initial shape in paper for the 2005 Kyoto conference (see publication below, 2006), he found that he had formulated a model that could be quite useful for the systematic interpretation of prehistoric and protohistoric iconography, where per definition the local historical actors' explanations and commentaries are lacking. This led to his contribution: | ||||
| THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF
DIVINATION SYSTEMS WORLD-WIDE. Becoming a sangoma
(diviner / priest / spirit medium /healer) in the
Southern African tradition constituted a break in Wim van
Binsbergen 's professional identity as an empirical,
historicising anthropologist, and forced him to redesign
his research work so as to steer away from the
objectifying Eurocentrism inherent in so much of
mainstream anthropology. The study of leopard-skin
symbolism and of comparative mythology was one strategy
of dealing with this challenge. Another strategy was to
explore, to the fullest possible geographical and
historical extent, the divination system which he had
learned during his training as a sangoma, and
whose regular use in that capacity had convinced him of
the fact that African modes of thought and of ritual
practice constitute ways to valid knowledge in their own
right, whatever the dismissive Western stereotype to
which they are subjected. From the early 1990s, Wim van
Binsbergen extensively applied himself to the comparative
study of African divination systems, which led to some of
the papers listed below. In recognition of the expertise
thus gathered, in 2005 he was asked to present a keynote
address at the major Leiden conference on African
divination: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005, 'Divination through space and time': keynote, Conference Realities re-viewed/ revealed: Divination in sub-Saharan Africa, Leiden 4-5 July 2005, National Museum of Ethnology (convenors: Philip Peek, Walter van Beek, Jan Jansen, Annette Schmidt) (click here for final programme) now in press in Walter van Beek & Philip Peek, eds., Proceedings of the Leiden 22005 conference [ provisional title ] abstract: African divination, the central topic of this timely international conference, does not exist in isolation – just as little as Africa itself does. All literate civilisations of both the Old and the New World possessed elaborate, multiple divination systems – and usually these systems came under the spell of astral divination (astrology) as history proceeded. Two millennia ago, Aristotle, Cicero and Plutarch, and many of their philosophical colleagues, reflected on the rationality and credibility of divination, establishing a philosophical tradition of reflection and debate on divination that has extended to Augustine, Ibn Ezra, Aquinas, Popper, Feyerabend, etc. I am not aware of any non-literate society in historical times that lacks all forms of divination – but there are severe limitations to my cross-cultural overview, and I may be mistaken; we shall come back extensively to the point of divination as a possible cultural universal. Divination, in Africa and elsewhere, tends to pose a strange Janus face to the North Atlantic epistemologist: apparently irrational in its choice of sources of knowledge, it subsequently pursues the acquisition of knowledge in a rational fashion: systematically, intersubjectively, with insistent recourse to causal reasoning and usually with at least the appearances of logic (underneath which often communicative tautologies may be detected). Today the study of divination is the, somewhat disreputable, privilege of anthropology, African Studies, the classics, Sinology, and the history of ideas. Their contention is that divination as a form of knowledge production is nonsensical pseudo-science, but that it is interesting as a cultural phenomenon, especially as a form of local wisdom helping people to sort out their small-scale social and psychological crises. Since 1990 I have been both a practicing African diviner, and a professor of intercultural philosophy/ cultural anthropology. In that period, globalisation and long-range comparative research have been major themes in my work. All this brings me to address, in this key note, the epistemological puzzle of divination, as well as its ramifications in space and time at the descriptive and comparative level. |
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| Wim van
Binsbergen's path-breaking Afrocentric synthesis of the
history of world mythology: Mythological archaeology: reconstructing humankind’s oldest discourse: A preliminary attempt to situate sub-Saharan African cosmogonic myths within a long-range intercontinental comparative perspective, paper for the comparative myth section of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) Pre-Symposium / 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable on ‘Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia’, organised by RIHN, NIHU / Harvard University, the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 6-8 June, 2005. now published as: |
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van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2004, 'The Leopard in
the Garden of Eating: From food for thought to thought
for food –
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ABSTRACT: My complex argument will touch on zoology, genetics, archaeology and linguistics, and risks to drown in an attempt at empirical and comparative underpinning, yet it is essentially an an attempt to identify precisely what my title says: The contemporary manifestation of Deep Structure in Africa. I will gradually lay bare what I see as historical layers that inform the life worlds in which African actors situate themselves today, in which they make their perceptions and decide on their actions, in other words in which they constitute and effectuate their agency. Some of these layers are autochthonously African, and arguably over 150,000 years old. Many of them however can be specifically traced to have an incomparably more recent history, an history that is largely intercontinenta; as such a history in which the general pulse beat of human cultural history can be gauged. It would be foolish to aim at completeness. Using the case of leopard-skin symbolism is my index fossil, I will concentrate on one topic, that I loosely indicate in terms of the opposition between immanentalism (the paramount sway of the here and the now) and transcendentalism (when the life world is largely conceived, by the actors, as being composed or elements and forces that do not belong to the here and the now, but that constitute a distinct mode of existence, or realm, in themselves |
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van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2004, The leopard's unchanging
spots: |
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| LEOPARD-SKIN SYMBOLISM,
SPECKLEDNESS, GRANULATION: Wim van Binsbergen's
explorations into the world-wide ramifications of
leopard-skin symbolism were prompted by his initiation,
in 1990, as a sangoma spirit medium / healer /
diviner in the Southern African tradition. On this
occasion, the attendant high priest (despite his
mentrix's insistence) refused him initiation at the High
God shrine at Nata, Botswana, until such time (which in
practice turned out to be no more than a few days) when
he presented himself there 'with the traditional attire
of his kind of people, a leopard skin'. Over the next
decade, Wim van Binsbergen devoted part of his research
time to finding out what the high priest's eminently
puzzling pronouncement may have meant. Having made the
grade as a sangoma, and having at long last solved the
puzzle to his own satisfaction, he wrote a long account
of his world-wide search (linguistic, iconographic, and
textual) to be included in his book Intercultural encounters: African and
Anthropological Lessons towards a Philosophy of
Interculturality (Berlin /
Boston 2003). However, he withdrew this chapter when he
found that (being trained in general linguisitcs but not
in the special branch of historical and comparative
linguistics relevant in this case) he could not get his
linguistic data in order at a professional level before
the agreed publication date, while the book was already
excessively voluminous even without another chapter.
Research and rethinking on leopard-skin symbolism,
speckledness, granulation, and the strikingly converging
lexical expressions of these descriptions of surface
texture throughout the linguistic macrophyla of the
world, continued throughout 2004, when he presented his
findings at a number of international conferences at
Harvard University, Leiden University and the Erasmus
University Rotterdam. These papers are included above as
clickable, fast-loading powerpoint presentations.
However, the projected book that would bring all this
fascinating resarch together has not yet been finished --
mainly because the leopard-skin symbolism research
initiated a new line of research which has absorbed much
of Wim van Binsbergen's research time in the next half
decade: comparative mythology, also extensively
represented above. An early instalment of the findings on leopard skin symbolism and its linguistic analysis has been: This argument was written before its author became conversant with long-range linguistic approaches such as those represented at Starostin & Starostin's Tower of Babel etymological database, under the aegis of some of the world's most prominent universities (Moscow, Leiden, Santa Fe). Therefore this argument is to be largely rewritten before it would be suitable for definitive publication. Meanwhile it contains enough food for thought to be allowed initial circulation here. |
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abstract | fullest version of paper | and for the published version: |
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Archaeoastronomy: Cupmark patterns, |
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Diffusionism and ludology: geomantic divination and mankala board-games |
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| Black
Athena Ten Years After
meanwhile, Wim van Binsbergen has devoted an entire webpage to the Black Athena debate, while the reprint as above is due to go to the press by 1st July, 2010 |
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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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| site established 7-4-99 with technical assistance from Vincent van Binsbergen; page last modified: 29-11-11 13:58:08 | ||||
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