African Studies - Science topic

Program

Money

Hello Tom,

I have just discovered that you have started researching a particular ethnic group from which I come. I must admit that this group is a little atypical, because it is located between several other peoples: the dualas, the yakalag, the malimba, the pongo-songo and the Longasse. These small people cannot be part of the large Bassa group, even if these two languages ​​are similar. But culturally the Bassa and the Ndonga are totally different. It should also be noted that the Ndonga language itself is a mixture of several other languages ​​(Bassa, Douala and Yakalag). Besides, nowhere in the history of the bassa is there any mention of the Ndonga. Maybe have a language and be related to another group?

 We are water and forest people. Fishing has always been the main activity of our ancestors.

For information on our origins, our demography, our history and in particular our old social organization, you could refer to the license dissertations written by certain Cameroonian students in the 1970s.

I am interested to know more too, and thank you for the interest you give to my people to whom I am so attached.

If you have already finished your research, I would be delighted to read you.

Jules Patrice EBOA

02 rue des Ecoles

67250 SOULTZ UNDER FORESTS

France

Phone: 0033751465065

Toufik Zerrouki I work with career guidance as a field of interest and as a teacher at the Master Program of Career Guidance at the University of South-Eastern Norway. We educate students for an MA working with career guidance also at university level. The aim is less "wrong" or "better" choices for the students getting guidance. My own experience is that guidance existed, but noone I knew used it. I chose the combination of philosophy and pedagogy with no guidance. The combination was not mainstream, so I might have benifited from making my own decisions. At the same time we see many students getting guidance feeling more secure about their choices and also discovering possibilities they did not know about before guidance.

1. You may undertake case study of recent "opening up" of KSA. Compare/Contrast it with one or two similar cases.

2. Is US influence waning in Middle East?

3. Geo-strategic effects of growing polarization amongst Arab States.

4. Similarities and differences in Chinese approach to Africa and Middle East.

I believe the meddling in others Sovereign State affairs is the cause for all security threats all over the world. If Algeria does not stick its nose in Mali's internal affairs, it will have nothing to worry about .  

Thanks for your reply and sorry for my very late answer. I am now working to a new publication on this topic together with my colleagues Jan Jansen and Mark Turin: "Searching For Sharing In Africa: Heritage, Multimedia Researchers and Diaspora Communities". More will follow.

Can you be more specific! Do you know if Section 508 of the Foreign Assistance Act was repealed or not?

Following a linguistic point a view, the answer to your question has to be found in this well-known book:

The Swahili

Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500

Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear

160 pages | 6 x 9 | 17 illus.

Paper 1985 | ISBN 978-0-8122-1207-5

Try the Polity Index by Gurr et al.

Dear Gerhard,

some narrations of the Nyemba should be in:

Seifert, Marc (ed.), Narrations of the Kavango : folktales and documentary texts from Northern Namibia and Southern Angola. Wortkunst und Dokumentartexte in afrikanischen Sprachen. Bd. 23. Köln : Köppe, 2006.

The book contains 59 folktales of peoples living on the Kavango (Kwangali, Mbunza, Manyo, Mbukushu, Nyemba), which were recorded in 2005 and 2006. There are also introductory chapters.

From the same publisher is:

Axel Fleisch: Language History in SE Angola – The Ngangela-Nyemba Dialect Cluster. In: Wilhelm J.G. Möhlig / Frank Seidel / Marc Seifert (eds.):

Language Contact, Language Change and History Based on Language Sources in Africa. SUGIA Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, Band 20. Köln : Köppe 2009, pp. 97-111.

Best wishes,

Stefan

Thanks for your help :) @Karla Cunningham

Hola Jose,  if  you have a personal email, I can send you some papers (PDF) of some lists of Old World Hallucinogens by a late colleague, anthropologist, Weston LaBarre.  Dr, LaBarre is author of the Peyote Cult (the definitive book on the peyote religion, used by Native Americans to help set up new charter church groups across the USA).  He also authored the book, The Ghost Dance" which is about the origins of religion, and in that tomb, Dr. LaBarre discusses the theory that most religions began with primitive humankind accidentally consuming plants of an entheogenic nature allowing one to see things they had never seen before and considered the reactions as coming from a deity.  I also have three great short papers by Dr. LaBarre form the late 1970s which lists other cultures that used such plants as sacraments, etc.  

I can also provide you with a list of references to mushroom use in Africa from my CD-ROM, Teonanacatl: A Bibliography of Entheogenic Fungi.  which covers their history from 5,000 years bp through December 2012.  At that time I ran out of funds to update the data and my bibliography has more than 3,000 references, more than 10,000 cross-references all linked to author-date citations, over 2306 annotations, Over 360 references on Soma featuring mainly, Amanita muscaria, and more than 1680 screen sized photographs pertaining to every aspect of psilocybian and other entheogenic Fungi.  Also included in that CD-ROM are several articles and a complete listing of the Wasson/Archives linked form Harvard University.

Other papers include my colleague and co-author of 7 academic papers with me on entheogenic fungi, he published a paper on Old World Hallucinogens.  In my library I have close to over 90 % of every book, journal and magazine articles on psilocybian producing mushrooms as well as papers and books on many other drugs.  One of my mentors over the years was the late Dr. Richard Evans Schultes,  He is known as the Father of Ethnobotany.    Please send me an email and I can supply you with several well written papers on some of the plants of Africa and on shrooms as well.

Happy New year to you and your loved ones, From Seattle and in symbiosis of our interest in this subject matter.

Best Regards,

John W. Allen

Good afternoon:

No, it's in the field od History and History of Education

Greetings,

O.N.

Dear Adeyemi,

I wonder why you have it that it is the secularization process that produces terrorist groups?

In my opinion the existing terrorist groups and factions today are the result of the opposite, namely their religious conceptions and the premise that their religious values and ideas about what their prophets conceived as dogmas are the only ones all humanity should profess. 

Deep inside human psyche is that humankind still can behave as a caged animal, which brings to the surface the worst of our behaviors. That originates fanatics and their followers.

The Suez Crisis created our current problems in the Middle East.

Leo Frobenius did a lot of traveling, researching and collecting in Africa. If you know this was the colonialist´s time, still a lot of good material he published in German. No idea which of his books is translated into English. May be "Kulturgeschichte Afrikas"?

Hermann Baumann: Schöpfung und Urzeit des Menschen im Mythus der afrikanischen Völker. (1936/1964) is also very interesting as it is doing a comparative mythology of the African tribes, which Frobenius as well started already to a certain degree.

The English books i know are all very specialised on certain tribes.

Many thanks for your help Jeffery and Ekkehard!

Dear Jörg, dear Elango,

you're hints are very much appreciated!

Best regards, Stefan

Jay D. Edwards, Louisiana State University

Not all of the social meanings embedded in the West African and Caribbean animal tales are obvious. There are very deep-seated meanings which may be teased out through structural analysis of the kind introduced by Claude Levi-Strauss, combined with Generative-Transformational analysis . Folklorists such as Richard Dorson completely misunderstood these meanings. The key is to discover the repeated categories of actions and actors across many tales (a genre), and then to set those categories into everyday social dilemmas faced by common people.

See my analysis of the Ashanti folktale, How It Came About that Children Were First Whipped (Tale Type 563) in THE AFRO-AMERICAN TRICKSTER TALE: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS. Monograph Series Vol. 4, Folklore Publications Group, Indiana University 1978, pp. 62-66.

Dear Mofat, African politics - as exemplified in words like baraza, gacaca, palambre - has maybe more to teach Europeans than the other way round.

Peter Emerson

Ahmet - this is perhaps the 'best' question I have seen asked on Researchgate - brilliantly pertinent.

I am biased though, my PhD asked this question - what connects x to 'the jihad' with x been two case studies on Thailand (Pattani) and Philippines (Mindanao). This is based on my inherent scepticism of the mooted connections (usually those of AQ). I tooth combed the literature looking for any thing verifiable and usually just four 'terrorologists' making wild claims without sources and evidence. 

Based on the philosophical work of Devji who told us that jihadist 'do not share cultic ideology' and plenty of accounts from jihadists of quite strong disagreement and difference I decided to do fieldwork myself to check on the reality of theses connections.

Briefly in sum - I've come back with the conclusion that the only connection is a complex and varied emotional connection to other muslim suffering. A cerebral connection that doesn't need AQs input anyway!

I considered Nigeria as a case study too and its something I follow so would be interested to follow your work if you are/do pursue this question.

Flavia I am not sure whether you mean cash to do research or cash incentives as in public works programmes. In the latter, cash is used e.g in Food for Work programmes, some programmes were converted into Cash for Work because of the logistics of distributing food (its quality) which is more difficult to sustain; If the incentives are for studies, ethical issues come to play - while you will enjoy the high retention rates as suggested by Mwambi, other researchers without the same resources will find it difficult to do their studies in the same location if they cannot match your incentive.   

It's very interesting to get a post on the issues that other countries face in educating their young people. By the sounds of it the majority of schools are under resourced and improving teacher quality would be the obvious (cheap?) way to improve outcomes, but would of course take time.

What are the minimum standards that schools, and teachers must meet?

Are these enforced?

would a tiered system of expectations regarding a teacher's English and subject knowledge be applicable (I.e. Different requirements for years 1-4, 4-6, 7-9 etc)?

I do not know about Rwanda (though I suspect that their overrepresentation of women is mostly accidental, and not a product of their democratic institutions or culture). There is, indeed, a large body of literature that relates an accurate representation of women in political office with the legitimacy of the democratic system (Stevens 2007). Moreover, many authors agree that women in office make a difference in the priorities and nature of the policies (i.e. more focused in social and welfare issues Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Schwindt-Bayer 2006; Clots-Figueras 2012, Rehavi 2008).

This is a new a refreshing topic. I begin by refering to a recent article by the trio of James OKORO, Richard INGWE and Mathew OJONG (Romanian Journal of Society & Politics) on economic-diplomatic relations between China and Nigeria. This study reveals hoe the Chinese have achieved much in terms of African market penetration without giving much to Africa/Nigeria. I'm just getting bits of these claims about the Visegrad four not being part of Africa's invasion. Some of us have spoken of European invasion of Africa in pretty monolithic ways/language. I realise now how the Visegrad four have been concerned about such thinking. I would presume that the interest of the Visegrad four remain their project and any success would arise from how hard each of them or four of them combined could undertake a joint economic diplomatic campaign i.e. programme. Is Visegrad an economic/political bloc of any kind? I would like to know more about this and if possible share some research time with experts from the region (Visegrad) maybe you. Conclusively, let me ask: what could be any credentials of the Visegrad in terms of undertaking the insidious neo-liberalistic offensive on Africa. Again, I draw your attention to my article (Ingwe, Ikeji & Ojong) on neo-liberalism and the role it has played in twarthing sustainable development efforts in Africa

Thank you David you have rally helped me.

Agreed with Dr. Tiia Vissak, there is no marked comparison or explanation which of the mentioned theories is suitable for internationalization. Each theory has its own particular shortcomings; therefore the scholars support the integration of several theoretical approaches in order to get better understanding.

Every language we lose is a bit of human culture (and definition) lost

i work in technical fields, in which every different viewpoint helps to detect different kinds of problems, and i believe that the same is true for language - every different language provides a different viewpoint about us as humans

The discussions on African women are quite interesting. However, on a cautionary note, one cannot speak of “Africa” as if it might be a single, unitary culture. That is not true. While Maria who has started this thread is obviously not African, nor might not have ever been to Africa, from knowledge of geography and history as well as several avenues of interaction with people from Africa, one point is clear, “there is no Africa” in the sense of a single culture or national entity. Thus, we should not speak of “Africa” in the same way we might speak of Spain, Italy, Ireland or Germany. While I acknowledge that there is no single “Africa” there are definite similarities that cut across most African tribes and cultures. In discussing African women, gender studies enjoin comparative focus on the women.