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This volume contains a collection of essays, some of which were first presented at a panel on Oral Traditions in Ethiopian Studies held at the 18th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in Derre Dawa in September 2012. The panel asked to investigate the proposition that, in the history of Ethiopian studies, reflection on the methodology of orality has not received the attention it deserves, given its importance in many fields of research. Nevertheless, the core matter of this Supplement to AETHIOPICA is to follow up on how Ethiopian studies deal with oral texts as historical and (in the broadest sense of the word) ethnographic sources. The editors and authors examine the methods and styles used in the study of oral sources, and provide methodological, theoretical, and empirical insights into the work with orality in Ethiopian studies. The introduction and thirteen case studies investigate, among others, the history of orality research, the interplay of written and oral evidence, methods of working in purely oral societies, and explore genres of oral traditions and orality in Ethiopia.
"In Sentinel Musicians of the Ethiopian American Diaspora, Kay Kaufman Shelemay shares more than forty years of research among Ethiopian musicians in the midst of a widespread and evolving diaspora. Beginning on the eve of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974 all the way up to the present day, Shelemay follows musicians as some leave Ethiopia for the US, setting up essential networks of support in cities such as New York, Boston, and Washington, DC. Throughout this profound transition, Shelemay shows how Ethiopian musicians serve a critical function in social and political life by both safeguarding community identity and challenging authority within Ethiopian society. She coins the term "sentine...
This edited collection explores forms of multi-religious cohabitation as well as the spatial arrangements that underpin and shape them through sixteen chapters that range across disciplines, historical periods, and global geographies. Focusing on interactions between different religious groups and traditions, the authors conceptualize three types of spatial arrangements and explore how they operate ad geographies of encounter; i.e., multi-religious places, multi-religious cities, and multi-religious landscapes. With perspectives from anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and geographers, the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which geographies of interreligious encounters and forms of multi-religious cohabitation have changed throughout history due to their embeddedness id different frameworks of political organization, shifting religious ideologies, and changing forms of human mobility.
This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Eur...
Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts—Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa’s centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. With incisive scholarship and new photography of works rarely or never before seen in public, this long-overdue publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders northern and eastern Africa’s contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the region as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.
This book is an interdisciplinary theological exploration of Haile Gerima's cinema, an Ethiopian filmmaker and storyteller who successfully translated African folkloric orality and wove other indigenous art forms into the language of cinema. Gerima's five decades legacy of Pan-African cinema embodies 'symbolic resistance' against Afro-pessimistic and stereotypical mis/disrepresentations, both manifestations of neo-colonialism. In response, he uses "camera as a weapon" to resist exotic otherness and alienation invented by conventional cinema. Through an alternative moving pictures, he depicted dignified images of Africa towards decolonising cinema and liberating the mind. His memory-films ach...
The Hatata Inquiries are two extraordinary texts of African philosophy composed in Ethiopia in the 1600s. Written in the ancient African language of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic), these explorations of meaning and reason are deeply considered works of rhetoric. They advocate for women’s rights and rail against slavery. They offer ontological proofs for God and question biblical commands while delighting in the language of Psalms. They advise on right living. They put reason above belief, desire above asceticism, love above sectarianism, and the natural world above the human. They explore the nature of being as well as the nature of knowledge, the human, ethics, and the human relation with th...
This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisci...
Based on a connected, relational and multidisciplinary approach (history, ethnography, political science, and theology), Mission and Preaching tackles the notion of mission through the analysis of preaching activities and religious dynamics across Christianity, Islam and Judaism, in the Middle East and North Africa, from the late 19th century until today. The 13 chapters reveal points of contact, exchange, and circulation, considering the MENA region as a central observatory. The volume offers a new chronology of the missionary phenomenon and calls for further cross-cutting approaches to decompartmentalise it, arguing that these approaches constitute useful entry points to shed new light on religious dynamics and social transformations in the MENA region. Contributors Necati Alkan, Federico Alpi, Gabrielle Angey, Armand Aupiais, Katia Boissevain, Naima Bouras, Philippe Bourmaud, Gaetan du Roy, Séverine Gabry-Thienpont, Maria-Chiara Giorda, Bernard Heyberger, Emir Mahieddin, Michael Marten, Norig Neveu, Maria Chiara Rioli, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Heather Sharkey, Ester Sigillò, Sébastien Tank Storper, Emanuela Trevisan Semi, Annalaura Turiano and Vincent Vilmain.