news
on the Shikanda portal : Wim van Binsbergen's recent
publications and work in progress
1. Intro
This series (established
February 2002; on this page only current topicalities from the
year 2008- are included; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2008-2009) is to
alert the visitor of new additions and changes in the Shikanda
portal, and reports on recent and forthcoming developments in Wim
van Binsbergen's professional activities inthe fields of African
Studies, Intercultural Philosophy, Long-Range Cultural Analysis,
and Poetry. Hyperlinks give access to the texts in question, and
photographs accompany the entries. The information appears in
tabulated form. The closer to the top of this page, the more
recent an event is. Some events have a page of their own,
accessible via a hyperlink; others are merely summarised below,
and may then have a simple illustration to mark them.
2. Other sites in the Shakanda portal
if you are through with
the topical information below, 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
3. Internal Search Facility for the
entire Shikanda portal
This search facility provides a complete
electronic index of the present website on ethnicity, and of all
of Wim van Binsbergen's other websites in the present domain, and
moreover enables you to search the entire Internet quickly and
effectively; simply enter the word(s) you require into the blank
search box, and press 'Search'
4. Shikanda Forum and Message Board
The many issues touched upon in Wim van
Binsbergen's research and publications often invite specific
comments and queries from site visitors. Often such exchanges
have a more than personal relevance, and often others would like
to join in. This is now possible with the new Shikanda Forum and
Message Board.
5. Topicalities: Wim van Binsbergen's recent
publications and work in progress
NB: the default language
in this webpage is English; however, the site owner lives and
works in the Netherlands, and writes poetry in Dutch; entries
reflecting an entirely national Dutch context will be in Dutch,
and will be marked by an orange
background; major entries will be separated by a light green
beam:
date
topic, links
details, background illustrations etc.
April 2010
While the 2009 (XXIII)
and 2010 (XXIV) volumes of Quest: An
African Journal of Philosophy / Revue
Africaine de Philosophie are now
being prepared for the press so as to
come out before Summer 2010, intensive
preparations are being made for volume
2011 (XXV), which will be entirely
devoted to the seminal work of the
Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi
Boulaga. The participants in this project
are all of them professionals, most of
them philosophers. This work
distinguishes itself from two other
recent publications on Eboussi. The first
one published in Paris, 2009, was a
volume of Mélanges in his
honour, under the editorship of Ambroise
Kom; the second, intended to be published
by Presence Africaine (in
principle), will include the proceedings
of the 'Journées Eboussi' which were
organized at the University of Yaounde,
Cameroon, in the summer of 2009.
Prominent African philosopher Valentin
Mudimbe, member of the Quest
Advisory Editorial Board, has played a
considerable role in these hommages which
celebrate Eboussi as one of the most
original and influential minds of modern
Africa.
Fabien
Eboussi Boulaga
The Belgian city
of Genk has a jumelage with the Botswana city of
Francistown. As a specialist on Francistown, Wim
van Binsbergen has been invited to advise the
Municipality of Genk on socio-cultural aspects of
the Botswana boom town, and to participate in a
panel meeting to be held in Genk, Belgium, Monday
19 April, 2010
to the left, click the
operating triangle to watch a superb
short movie bringing out, against the
homely theme of an ordinary mature woman
killing and preparing a cock for dinner,
many of the contradictions of modern
Francistown life, between (youthfully
revived) dust-coloured tradition -- and
glossy, gaudy globalisation: "Ready",
a 2004 (2008 re-edit) video by Eva
Heldmann, intercutting a ballroom dancing
competition in Francistown, Botswana, the
Mogwana Dancers in Gaborone, Botswana,
and more. The quality of the film allows
full-screen playing, by activating the
square of four arrows bottom right in the
video screen. Although the traditional
dancers, like the ballroom ones, clearly
dress up for the occasion and (as cynical
culture critics would be quick to point
out) present some sort of performative
maskerade, yet the young girl's dance
solo at the end has all the vigour and
the redemptive beauty of historic African
culture through the ages -- as I am
qualified to say, as a certified Botswana
sangoma, i.e. traditional
therapeutic and divinatory dancer, myself
After the movie Ready, take the
opportunity of sampling a few more videos
of Botswana life, by clicking on the
upward arrow extreme right at the bottom
of the video screen
Francistown:
modern formal structures in the 'dustbowl full of
sand' (a colonial stereotype for Botswana)
December 2009-March 2010
UNIVERSITE PROTESTANTE
PROTESTANT UNIVERSITY
D’AFRIQUE CENTRALE
(UPAC)
OF CENTRAL AFRICA (PUCA)
International
Colloquium on The Problematic of
Peace and Development in Africa:
Balance Sheet and New Stakes in
the 3rd
Millennium (convenor Jr. Prof.
Célestin Tagou), Faculty of
Social Sciences and International
Relations, Protestant University
of Central Africa, Yaounde,
Republic of Cameroon, 6-9 April
2009
After the successful
completion of this International
Colloquium in May 2009, the convenor, Jr
Prof. Celestin Tagou, managed to have all
the papers revised and submitted within
half a year, and the conference book is
now ready to go to the printer's. Wim van
Binsbergen has been honoured to advise on
the editorial process, and to contribute
a Foreword to this splendid and timely
collection
Jr Prof. Celestin Tagou,
UPAC
Archaic
cosmology: Rain and its Adversary, the Rainbow
The five-tiered
ethico-linguistic system of
the Bronze-Age Mediterranean, arguably
including a proto-Bantu / Khoisan substrate
Stealing the
moon by building Kapesh kamunungampanda,
'The Kapesh tower from forked branches', in a
major Nkoya
myth of kingship, Zambia
In February 2010,
Wim van Binsbergen will be 63 years old. It is
time to begin to wind up the research projects in
which -- with the constant support of the African
Studies Centre, Leiden, and with great
inspiration from the Netherlands Institute for
Advances Studies, the Philosophical Faculty
Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Harvard
Round Table on Comparative Mythology -- he has
engaged for the past twenty years: ever since his
unsettling transcultural experiences during
anthropological fieldwork inFrancistown,
Botswana, brought him to radically reconsider
standard forms of North-South knowledge
construction in anthropology and oral history,
and to engage in transcontinental explorations
aimed at ascertaining the pre- and
proto-historical continuities between Africa and
other continents -- ultimately in a bid to
establish the empirical foundations for the
thesis of the fundamental unity of humankind.
Around the turn of 2010 Wim van Binsbergen has
been working on the finalisation of a number of
books and articles that are scheduled for
publication in the course of that year, notably:
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘The continued relevance of Martin
Bernal’s Black Athena thesis:
Yes and No’
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘Before the Pre-Socratics: The evidence
of a common elemental transformational cycle
underlying Asian, African and European
cosmologies since Neolithic times’
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘The continuity of African and Eurasian
mythologies: As seen from the perspective of
the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central
Africa’, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Venbrux, Eric, eds., New
Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the
Second Annual Conference of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Cluster
analysis assessing the relation between the
Eurasian, American, African and Oceanian
linguistic macro-phyla: On the basis of the
distribution of the proposed *Borean
derivates in their respective lexicons: With
a lemma exploring *Borean reflexes in
Guthrie’s Proto-Bantu
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Towards
the Pelasgian hypothesis: An integrative
perspective on long-range ethnic, cultural,
linguistic and genetic affinities
encompassing Africa, Europe, and Asia
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Out
of Africa or out of Sundaland: Mythical
discourse in global perspective
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Joseph
Karst: Pioneering long-range approaches to
Mediterranean Bronze Age ethnicity
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
'Reconsidering spiked wheel traps: An
exercise in global cultural distribution
analysis'
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
'Towards the prehistory of African
divination'
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘Building with skulls, and stealing the
moon: Aspects of the continuity of African
and Eurasian mythologies: As seen from the
perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia,
South Central Africa’, in: Venbrux,
Eric, & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., eds., Studies
in Comparative Mythology
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Venbrux, Eric, eds., New
Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the
Second Annual Conference of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology
Venbrux, Eric, & van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., eds., Studies in
Comparative Mythology
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Woudhuizen, Fred, Ethnicity in
Mediterranean proto-history
draft versions of
many of these texts have already been made
available from this website; specific hyperlinks
to these earlier versions will soon be provided,
while their imminent publication is pending
Dendrogram
of the proposed relationships between
linguistic macrophyla under Starostin's *Borean
hypothesis, including the likely place of Bantu
and Khoisan, with various alternative time scales
A schematic transformative
cycle of elements,
such as arguably underlies the Taoist
cosmology, the Nkoya clan system in South
Central Africa, and the pre-Socratic /
Aristotelian four-element system
In Wim van Binsbergen's most
recent work, a central role is played by his Pelasgian
Hypothesis as the culmination of his
transcontinental research, over the past 20
years, into geomantic divination, mankala
games, leopard-skin symbolism, comparative
mythology, language macrophyla, the spiked wheel
trap, and other formal systems demonstrably
linking Africa and the other two continents of
the Old World -- against the background of the
increasingly detailed and convincing long-range
insights molecular genetics, comparative and
historical linguistics, and comparative
mythology, are offering into the past of
Anatomically Modern Humans, especially from the
Upper Palaeolithic onwards. Wim van Binsbergen's
imminent publications scheduled for 2010 are
intended to present most of this work in
progress. Here the Pelasgian Hypothesis will
appear as a viable alternative, not only for
Stephen Oppenheimer's intriguing and perceptive
Sunda thesis, but especially for Martin Bernal's Black
Athena thesis. The Pelasgian Hypotheis lacks
the reductionist (albeit refreshingly
antihegemonic and anti-Eurocentric)
Egyptocentrism or Afrocentrism of Bernal's work,
and instead highlights the exceptional continuity
and creativity of the Mediterranean-centred
Pelasgian Realm -- as a major seedbed even of
African languages and cultures; in the process,
much new light is cast upon one of the most
formative periods of global proto-history: the
Sea Peoples Episode at the end of the Bronze Age.
current year: 2010 (begins above this line; the closer to
the top of the page, the nearer to 2011); clickhere for the years 2008-2009
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
