Wim van Binsbergen
© 2007 W.M.J .van Binsbergen
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An Africanist's
itinerary of long-range research, 1968-2007 Wim van Binsbergen © 2007 W.M.J .van Binsbergen |
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models of thought index page
The itinerary of my
long-range research, 1968-2007[1]
Wim van Binsbergen
From the studies collected on my webpage
'Ancient Models of Thought' it is clear that for over a decade
now I have consistently produced extensive long-range comparisons
and synthetic analyses of formal cultural systems. The ambitions
implied in such a sustained project, and my confidence in deeming
these ambitions capable of being realised, would be unthinkable
and absurd unless against the background of a very long period of
preparation. Let me briefly sketch that background, so as to take
away the unfortunate impression that my aggregate, global
approach is the impromptu product of a hard scientist without any
feeling for the humanities – of someone who appropriates the
study of myth and turn its into some aggregate model-building
exercise without knowing what he is talking about.
My first identity, back in the 1960s (and one which I have retained across the decades), was that of a budding poet cum literary scholar, when (on the basis of an extensive classical training in Greek, Latin, and modern West European languages) I used the European mythical canon in my own poetry, and intensely studied the mythical elements in the literary prose of two (then) prominent writers, the Russian/American Vladimir Nabokov and the Belgian Hugo Claus. I recently had occasion to return to these projects, in my work on transcontinental traditional knowledge systems as inspired by my reading of Sandra Harding in the early 2000s; and in a long theoretical paper on the philosophy and epistemology of comparative mythology (van Binsbergen 2003b)
After reading
anthropology, sociology and general linguistics, and after
specific language training mainly in Arabic, I did
anthropological and oral historical fieldwork on popular Islam in
the Khumiri highlands of N.W. Tunisia (1968). In this effectively
illiterate peasant society, I engaged for the first time with
what were to remain life-long passions of mine:
· ecstatic
religion/shamanism,
· transgressing
the anthropologist’s professional boundaries of reserve and
distance vis-a-vis the host society and its religion and ritual,
not only is – insturmentally – good for public relations in
the field, but also liberates fieldwork from its hegemonic
distancing, and restores it as an incomparably valuable
intercultural encounter; already in Khumiriyya, I engaged in
ecstatic ritual, and I have kept up the cult of the local saint
Sidi Mhammad ever since;
· making
history where no history yet exists – here with a time depth of
only two to three centuries, and within a narrow spatial horizon
of only 12 km2 (in later decades my scope would shift
to millennia and continents), but always intent on analysing
local myth and extracting whatever kernel of history they might
contain.[2]
· trying
to make sense of the kind of long-range cultural continuity the
local peasants were displaying: their local shrines included many
Bronze Age megaliths, but continued to function in a nominally
Islamic rural life in the mid-20th century CE.
Shifting my research
to sub-Saharan Africa from 1971 on, my first major academic book
(Religious change in Zambia, 1981) was an attempt to
reconstruct, largely precolonial, patterns of religion (including
ancestral cults, royal cults, possession and healing cults)
throughout the period 1500-1964, and throughout the South Central
African region; data derived from my own field research in urban
Zambia and among the Nkoya people of rural western central
Zambia,and moreover from published sources, archives, and a
smattering of archaeology and linguistics. As a regional
synthesis effectively and massively transcending the narrow
horizons of space and time to which ethnographic fieldwork is
usually limited, and establishing an extensive theoretical and
methodological basis for regional cross-cultural and historical
comparison, this study was in many ways a major preparation for
the long-range research that would gain momentum in my work one
and a half decades later. 
In 1992, similar
ground was covered, but for a substantially smaller region
(western central Zambia), in my book Tears of Rain.[3]Here
cosmologies, myths and oral traditions concerning the rise of
kingship, were analysed by their own inherent standards, and were
also treated as decodable statements on factual regional history.
The book was acclaimed as a major achievement in oral history
(Vansina 1993). This work established the study of myth as a
central theme in my work, and explored some of the methdological
and theoretical challenges attending this field, again in
preparation of my later long-range research. 
Meanwhile I had
diversified my field experience to include West Africa (1983),
and Francistown, Botswana, Southern Africa (1988 onwards). In
West Africa, my fieldwork among the Manjak people of the Upper
Guinea Coast (Guinea Bissau) forced me to further sensitise
myself to the study of myth in an African context, made me
pioneer the role of (not just observer but) patient of local
healers, and also brought me to a new region marked by the
continuity of social transformation across centuries of
mercantile para-colonial trans-Atlantic and Portuguese
influences. Similar transregional, ultimately transcontinental,
influences transpired in my Botswana work (cf. van Binsbergen
1996, 2006) even though this was at first conveived as a study of
cultural globalisation at the local urban level.
Francistown delivered
its precious lessons only indirectly, and through a painful
process. Being Dutch, ostracism as a ‘Boer’-related
hereditary enemy in the urban society of Francistown, just before
the end of apartheid in nearby South Africa, plunged me into a
devastating personal crisis. I could less than ever maintain my
professional distance vis-a-vis the host society, and within
three years ended up as a certified diviner-healer in a local
ecstatic cult – another identity I have since kept up (although
I have meanwhile, as a professor of intercultural philosophy
since 1998, thoroughly addressed the obvious epistemological
puzzles involved). An widely circulated article in the Journal
of Religion in Africa, (1991) ‘Becoming a sangoma:
Religious anthropological fieldwork in Francistown, Botswana’,[4] was
the first published scholarly report on this episode in English,
many more such studies were to follow,[5] and my final assessment of the intercultural
philosophical and especially epistemological implications of this
more make up a large part my 2003a book Intercultural
encounters.[6]
Having ‘gone
native’, I could no longer bring myself to conduct standard,
objectifying anthropological fieldwork. But my intense engagement
with local divination[7] and other rituals brought me, as a
serendipity, another type of knowledge: in many cultic elements
that were locally perceived as African (though not necessarily as
purely local), I began to suspect, then to detect, the resonances
of what I then only dimly recognised as the great intellectual
traditions from the Ancient Near East, classic Arabian
civilisation, West Africa and Malagasy cosmologies and divination
systems, and even elements from South, South East, and East Asia.
This generated questions that have since been at the centre of my
research:
· Could
I replace the condescending, objectifying ‘othering’ that is
the typical anthropologists’ stance, for a claim of the
underlying interconnectedness of many or all human knowledge
systems, so that my own academic scholarship, and the
ethnoscience of my diviner colleagues and teachers, could be
revealed to be but branches of the same stem?
· Beyond
biology – where humankind’s unity was an established theme
– , could I make the case for the intellectual unity of
all humankind – in the sense that ancient, especially
prehistoric, knowledge systems, hitherto mainly pressed into
service by anthropologists, ideologists and politicians to merely
divide cultures and ethnic groups, could also be argued to unite
humankind?
· And
would I manage to uphold my claims of cultural connectedness and
continuities even though these were absolutely anathema in
modern, fragmented, anti-diffusionist, fieldwork-obsessed
anthropology? Fortunately, here the tide was turning, in the
sense that the extensive interest in globalisation studies from
the early 1990s onward has trigger, for better or worse (cf.
Amselle 2002), a renew interest in neo-diffusionist approaches to
modern culture as well as to proto-globalisation, and thus a
renewed rapproachement to archaeology.
My quest to trace the
world history of cleromantic and geomantic divination soon took
me to the limits of documented intellectual history: Islamic
occultism, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia,
South and East Asia, even Renaissance Europe and the modern
Caribbean. I thanked my good fortune, that had left me somewhat
better prepared for such a task, linguistically and scholarly,
than most modern anthropologists (for whom linguistics is no
longer the cornerstone it was a hundred years ago, and for whom
the cultural and intellectual history of the North Atlantic
region is often a closed book).
In the process I came
into contact with a similar, but at that point in time far more
elaborate, attempt at long-range cultural history: Martin
Bernal’s (1987, 1991) Black Athena thesis, on the
cultural (including mythological) indebtedness of Ancient Greece
to Ancient Egypt.
Reaching the limits
of what my Africanist and ethnic studies environment could offer
me, I was fortunate to join (1994-95) the Work Group on Religion
and Magic in the Ancient Near East, Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Studies, where specialists in Assyriology and Biblical
Studies added a whole new dimension to my anthropological and
Africanist knowledge. It was mainly in this context that I wrote
and published my first studies in long-range intercontinental
continuities, in geomantic divination and in what appeared to
have a remarkably similar distribution and history: mankala
board games. Based on the controlled movement of counters along a
series of holes, mankala put me on the track of the world-wide
(especially Bronze Age and megalithic) symbolism of cupmarks,
ultimately to explore cupmarks in the context of a Neanderthal
burial.[8]
Convening a conference
(1996), and subsequently editing (1997) a collection, aiming at a
critical but emphatically positive reassessment of the Black
Athena thesis was my first attempt to specifically contribute
to studies on the Bronze Age and the Ancient Near East. The
collection was a success in that its positive assessment managed
to reopen the Black Athena debate, which Lefkowitz &
Rogers (1996) believed concluded with their own dismissive
statement in devastatingly critical Black Athena revisited..
However, my own
position would not remain so positive. My next attempt (so far
unpublished) was to apply the Black Athena thesis to
Africa with (hopefully) more Africanist competence than Bernal
could muster, I made several striking discoveries:
1. Early
Dynastic Egypt was a product, not just (pace
Afrocentrists, including Bernal) of sub-Saharan Africa, but also,
even mainly, of (West-) Asian contributions that had no recent
roots in sub-Saharan Africa
2. Instead
of Bernal’s unilineal, one-way, Egyptocentric model of direct
Greek cultural andreligious indebtedness to Egypt, both Greece
and Egypt derived elements from a common source (Neolithic and
older) which also informed much of West Asia, Ancient Northern
Europe, and even much of sub-Saharan, Niger-Congo (more
specifically Bantu-) speaking Africa
3. In
order to make his point concerning Egypt/Aegean relations, Bernal
often draws a parallel with China/Korea relations: in both cases,
the cultural imperialism of the former, greater civilisation, is
to explain the dependence of the latter, more secondary and
peripheral civilisation. However, I would instead point to a
counter-example, notably the case of shamanism in both China and
Korea: there is no reason whatever to assume that Korean
shamanism derives largely from a Chinese prototype, and there is
much more reason to attribute the phenomenon, in both countries,
to the influence of a Central Asian shamanistic complex informing
both:
not:
A
----------> B
but:
C
----------> A
|
|
|
|
\/
B
My contention is that
the latter model provides the real explanation for many of the
Egyptian/Aegean connections which Bernal did rightly point out,
but failed to explain adequately.
These three findings
opened my eyes for the partial, myopic, and ideologically
programmatic nature of Bernal’s thesis, despite its continued
value as a critique of Eurocentrist scholarship.
This attempt in which I first set out to explore systematically my surprising impressions of transcontinental continuities in Africa, was initially in the very response to Martin Bernal’s own request – he had asked me to contribute my positive assessment of his Black Athena position for a collection planned as a reply to Lefkowitz & Rogers. However, as I was writing the piece I became more and more aware of the severe shortcomings – as outlined above – of the Black Athena thesis, and less and less inclined to rush once more to its author’s defence. I became engrossed in a rather different theme: the more I processed comparative historical data on Bantu-speaking sub-Saharan Africa, the more that part of the world (on which my research had passionately concentrated since 1971) turned out to be permeated with mythical, cultural and royal themes that are otherwise familiar from West, South, South East and East Asia, and Ancient Europe.
A number of alternative models rivalled for prevalence:
· Was
this Ancient Egypt spreading civilisation, not only North to the
Aegean, but also South and West, into Africa?
· Was
it, as Afrocentrists would have it (and I have been, like Bernal,
a major European defender of Afrocentricity), the other way
around: sub-Saharan Africa spawning Ancient Egyptian civilisation
and the latter, in its turn, Graeco-Roman civilisation and
ultimately the European dominant civilisation today under North
Atlantic hegemony?
· Or
would we have to do away with all monocausality, and instead
stress the transcontinental multicentredness of cultural history
– in which at least there is no longer room for Eurocentrism?
· Or
was there (as indicated above, and as I firmly believe today,
nearly a decade later) an older source partly, even largely,
responsible for Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and Bantu-speaking
Africa? And if so, could that source be identified?
Taking the well-known Ancient Egyptian royal
title nswt bit 
(‘The One of the Sedge and the Bee’; Gardiner)
as my main test case, the draft book’s rambling argument –
still unfocussed for lack of a coherent analytical and
methodological perspective – grew and grew under the working
title Global bee flight, that I kept announcing as
‘forthcoming’ for years.
These dilemmas made
me look with new eyes at my reconstructions underlying Tears
of Rain: I had naively followed my African informants in
considering their oral traditions as factual stories about the
recent pre-colonial past (second half of the 2nd mill. CE).
However, now these traditions appeared to consist, largely, of
familiar mythical themes that had percolated through the
civilisations of the Old World (and especially Ancient Egypt) for
millennia, and that therefore could not convincingly be invoked
as pointers to factual regional history!
This collapse of my
regional middle-range proto-historical reconstructions in South
Central Africa, in a positive sense led the way to my subsequent
long-range comparative historical reconstructions on a global
scale.
The comparative
global history of the divination systems (with excursions into
mankala, and an application to the Black Athena thesis)
was the first sustained project triggered by the crisis in my
ethnographic habitus in the late 1980s. It has led to a large
number of published articles and conference papers, which will
soon be woven into one coherent book.[9]
A second project,
that is largely beyond our present scope, is the epistemological
reflection on intercultural knowledge production – which gave
me the chance to trade my Amsterdam chair in ethnic studies
(1990) for a Rotterdam chair in intercultural philosophy (1998);
cf. van Binsbergen 2003a and 2001)
When I became a
diviner-healer in the Southern African tradition, I was finally
ordained at the Mwali High-God shrine of Nata, in the Botswana
interior. On that occasion I was singled out to don a
leopard-skin ‘as the traditional emblem of my kind of
people’. Puzzlingly, such a privilege was without any publicly
available explanation within the local cult, nor did it clearly
resonate with my personal life history. I was intrigued, could
not restrain my curiosity, and started out on ‘a mission from
God’[10] to find out why my crossing over from
anthropology to sangomahood had earned me a divinely requested
leopard skin. Therefore, my third recent project, specifically
aimed at long-range comparative historical reconstructions on a
global scale, consisted in tracing the amazingly wide
distribution and amazingly constant nature of leopard-skin
symbolism. This brought me to explore iconology, archaeology,
comparative linguistics, and Deleuzian post-structural philosophy
as basic auxiliary disciplines to long-range cultural history.
For the first time I became aware, and dared formulate
explicitly, patterns of global cultural continuity, that went
totally against the grain
· of
established paradigms in main-stream, fieldwork based
anthropology,
· and
of established geopolitical distinctions in terms of
nation-states, subcontinents, and continents.
My explorations into
leopard symbolism worldwide were initially intended to make up
chapter 8 of the book Intercultural encounters. However,
the chapter grew to assume book length in its own right, while
the methodological and analytical problems attending what had
started out as a naive act of curiosity. As the publication date
of Intercultural encounters could no longer be postponed,
I decided to reserve the leopard theme for a later book. This
gave me the opportunity to much further develop the argument and
to test it at a number of international conferences. [11]
However, many puzzles
remained. There was so much that I could not yet explain, partly
because I lacked the overall interpretative framework, partly
because my grasp of auxiliary disciplines (linguistics, genetics,
palaeoanthropology) was too feeble. In combination with my many
other commitments, this left me no choice but to confide my very
extensive provisional results on leopard-skin symbolism to the
Internet, but postponing definitive publication until I had
reason to feel more confident.
These puzzles also
came to the fore when, early in the new millennium, and as a
fourth major project, I discussed Sandra Harding’s (e.g. 1997)
inspiring critique of Eurocentric, hegemonic assumptions about
global modern science. I was fascinated to see her play with the
idea that the universality commonly claimed for such science may
well have to do with its present-day ubiquity: modern science is
implicitly present in every cellphone, every motorcar, every
secondary school all over the world. I was immediately triggered
to demonstrate the very wide, sometimes continental and even
transcontinental, distribution of other forms of (especially formal)
knowledge systems, such as myths, board games, divination
systems, the nomenclature of clan systems. I sought to elucidate
the uncanny continuities I believed to have spotted between
repertoires of clan names, sets of divinatory objects, zodiacs,
and other astronomical nomenclature, throughout the Old World,
and when time and again I hit on Chinese/South Asian/South
Central African continuities. Little in accepted cultural history
had prepared me for this – except perhaps some work by despised
and allegedly obsolete German diffusionists and ‘cultural
morphologists’ such as Frobenius, Baumann, and von Sicard.
Dissatisfied with my results, however tantalising, I once more
shelved them on the Internet,[12] and moved on again.
Subsequent
involvement in networks for comparative mythology centred on
Leiden (Mineke Schipper / Daniela Merolla) and Harvard (Michael
Witzel) forced me (and also made it easier for me) to approach
the auxiliary disciplines mentioned above at a more professional
level, and to add one crucial other discipline: genetics.
Finally, my
involvement with the Bronze Age Mediterranean in the Khumiri
context and the Black Athena debate, was renewed, and
obtained a major mythological focus, when Fred Woudhuizen asked
me to join hands with him in research on ethnicity in
Mediterranean protohistory (cf. Woudhuizen 2006; van Binsbergen
& Woudhuizen, in press). Trying to situate the contemporary
documents and the archaeological data on the Sea Peoples in a
long-range perspective, and scanning both Genesis 10 and the
Homeric Catalogue of Ships for clues as to ethnic structures,
forced me to reconsider Flood myths, ‘Back-into-Africa’
migration, seafaring in Antiquity, the world history of male
genital mutilation, east-west parallels in toponyms, theonyms,
divine attributes and myths, etc. etc.
It was at this point
(early 2005) that Michael Witzel (having patiently accommodated
my leopard argument in the earlier Harvard Roundtable) invited me
to present an argument on African ‘creation’ (I prefer:
cosmogonic) myths, for the Comparative Myths section of the 7th
RIHN/ Harvard International Conference on Ethnogenesis in South
and East Asia, Kyoto, Japan, June 2005. Under great pressure of
time, I combined the ‘Out-of-Africa’ scenario with Witzel’s
idea on myth constituting an independent source on humankind’s
remotest past. True to my life-long determination to produce
history where previously there was none (no doubt a neurotic
drive going back to some formative infantile conflict in myself
and in the families that produced me), I pioneered an
‘Out-of-Africa’ comprehensive and integrated history of world
mythology. From then on, I have worked fanatically to develop the
argument, iron out its inconsistencies, naiveties and signs of
professional ignorance, and work the original paper into a book,
Against this
background, also my 2006 paper for the Beijing follow-up
Roundtable was an attempt to develop that argument further and
remedy some of its inevitable shortcomings.
References
Amselle, J.-L., 2001, Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalite des cultures, Paris: Flammarion
Bernal, M., 1987, Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I, The
Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1787-1987, London: Free
Association Books/ New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
Bernal, M., 1991, Black Athena: The
Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. II, The
Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. London: Free
Association Books; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Harding, S., 1997, ‘Is Modern Science an
Ethnoscience? Rethinking Epistemological Assumptions’, in: Eze,
Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed., Postcolonial African philosophy: A
critical reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 45-70.
Lefkowitz, M.R., & MacLean Rogers, G.,
eds, 1996, Black Athena revisited, Chapel Hill &
London: University of North Carolina Press.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981, Religious
Change in Zambia: Exploratory studies, London/Boston: Kegan
Paul International.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, ‘Becoming a sangoma: Religious
anthropological field-work in Francistown, Botswana’, Journal
of Religion in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/become.htm
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Tears of
Rain: Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia, London/Boston:
Kegan Paul International; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/general/gen3/tearsof.htm
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, ‘Transregional and historical
connections of four-tablet divination in Southern Africa’,
Journal of Religion in Africa, 26, 1: 2-29; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/techno.htm
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black
Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and
Historical Society, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the
Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, vols 28-29,
1996-97; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/afrocentrism/index.htm
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2001,
‘Noordatlantische wetenschap als etno-wetenschap: Een
intercultureel-filosofische reflectie op Sandra Harding’, paper
read at the seminar on ‘Kennis en Cultuur’ (Knowledge and
culture), Netherlands Association for the Philosophy of Science,
Utrecht, 23/11/2001; English version in press as: ‘The
underpinning of scientific knowledge systems: Epistemology or
hegemonic power? The implications of Sandra Harding’s critique
of North Atlantic science for the appreciation of African
knowledge systems’, in Hountondji, P., ed., Le rencontre des
rationalites: Proceedings Proto Novo Colloquium on Le rencontre
des rationalites, September 2002, Paris: UNESCO/Karthala;
also at: http://www.shikanda.net/general/porto_novo_for_hountondji_2-2003_bis.pdf
.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2003a,
Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological towards a
philosophy of interculturality, Berlin/Muenster: LIT; also
at: http://www.shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/index.htm
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2003b, ‘Rupture
and fusion in the approach to myth (Situating myth analysis
between philosophy, poetics, and long-range historical
reconstruction, with an application to the ancient and world-wide
mythical complex of leopard-skin symbolism’, paper read at the
International Conference ‘Myth: Theory and the Disciplines’,
12 December 2003, University of Leiden: Research School CNWS
(School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies), IIAS (The
International Institute for Asian Studies); and NWO (Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research), now in the press in:
Merolla, D., Schipper, M., and Segal, R., eds., Myth and the
disciplines, special issue of Mythology; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/Myth_shorter_for_journal.pdf
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2006,
‘Mythological archaeology: Situating sub-Saharan cosmogonic
myths within a long-range intercontinential comparative
perspective’, in: Osada, Toshiki, with the assistance of Hase,
Noriko, eds., Proceedings of the Pre-symposium of RIHN and 7th
ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable, Kyoto: Research Institute for
Humanity and Nature (RIHN), pp. 319-349; fulltext also at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/kyoto%20as%20published%202006%20EDIT2.pdf
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005, ‘ ‘‘We are in this for the
money’’: Commodification and the sangoma cult of Southern
Africa’ in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Peter Geschiere,
2005, eds., Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities: The
social life of Things revisited, Berlin/Muenster: LIT,
ISBN 3-8258-8804-5, pp. 319-348 + bibliography pp. 351-378; also
at: http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/Wim_van_Binsbergen_Commodification_and_sangoma_cult.pdf
van Binsbergen, Wim, & Woudhuizen,
Fred, in press, Ethnicity in Mediterranean proto-history,
Cambridge: British Archaeology Reports.
Vansina, J., 1993, [ Review of :
Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and
history in Central Western Zambia, Londen/ Boston: Kegan Paul
International ] , Anthropos, 88: 215-217.
Woudhuizen, Fred., 2006, ‘The ethnicity
of the Sea Peoples’, PhD thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
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models of thought index page
[1] Introduction
originally written for the revised Beijing 2006 paper, but
discarded for reasons of space and convention, and reserved for
an introduction of a forthcoming book in which much of the
unpublished work reviewed here, will be brought out.
[2] Cf. the website
which I recently established to reflect this research: http://www.shikanda.net/Berber/index.htm
; there, the index page spells out in more detail how my Khumiri
research set the agenda for most of my subsequent studies in
anthropology, (proto-) history, and intercutural philosophy.
[3] Also available at: http://www.shikanda.net/general/gen3/tearsof.htm
[4] Also at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/become.htm
[5] They can be
accessed on Internet via the following page: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/diviner.htm
[6] The webpage http://www.shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/index.htm
contains major sections of this book.
[7] The webpage http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/divinati.htm
gives an overview of my work on divination.
[8] My work on mankala
and geomantic divination, including published papers, can be
accessed from: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/index.html
[9] The webpage http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/divinati.htm
gives an overview of my work on divination.
[10] This literal
quotation from the cult movie The Blues brothers,
pronounced tongue in cheek and with affected American accent, at
the beginning of my first presentation before the Harvard
Roundtable on Ethnogenesis in South and East Asia and Comparative
Mythology, 2004, created considerable confusion. Having been
harrassed for years by religious fundamentalist and nationalist
opposition to their own state-of-the-art scholarship, my audience
could not appreciate the humour of me self-ironically invoking
some divine dispensation as the initiating drive behing my highly
ambitious, global project of detached and painstaking empirical
scholarship.
[11] My work on
mankala and geomantic divination can be accessed from: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/index.html
[12] At: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/animal.htm
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