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
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4. Shikanda Forum and Message Board
This service has been discontinued
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.
October 2010
The 4th Annual Meeting of the
International Association for Comparative
Mythology (IACM) will take place at Harvard
University, Cambridge (Mass.), USA, in the early
days of October, 2010. Wim van Binsbergen
proposes to present a paper entitled:
on this occasion, Eric Venbrux
and Wim van Binsbergen intend to launch the
Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting IACM, 2008,
which they are editing and which are to be
published mid-2010.
September 2010
While
the paper highlights especially the bee part of
the reed-and-bee complex of the Ancient Egyptian
royal titulature as (at least, that is what my
argument claims) echoed in modern South Central
Africa, this photograph shows King Kahare Kabambi
of the Mashasha Nkoya, Kaoma district, Zambia,
1977, holding a reed-mat as emphatic
sign of historical identity. His explicit
reference was that when the expanding Luyi ousted
the Mashasha (the name has no conscious reed-mat
connotations but refers to sour beer) from the
Zambezi flood-plain, they carried their reed-mats
with them -- an enigmatic action, for reed for
new mats can be found everywhere in Western
Zambia; however, my hypothesis is that these mats
were mobile coffins, containing the bodies of
royal ancestors.
A second, truncated
installment of Wim van Binsbergen's views on
links between Ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan
Africa is to be published in i-Medjat 5:
reed-mat burial was practiced in Early
Dynastic Egypt; cf. Goneim, M. Zakaria, 1956, The
Lost Pyramid, New York: Rinehart
August 2010
July 2010
Wim van Binsbergen
joins the Editorial Board of Culture and
Dialogue, a peer reviewed semi-annual
journal to be launched in Winter 2010;
contracting publisher: Airiti Press Inc., Taipei,
Editor-in-Chief: Gerald Cipriani; click here for the circular introducing
that new journal
BLACK ATHENA COMES OF AGE
This book reflects the
intellectual encounter, over the years, between,
on the one hand, a group of Dutch scholars
studying the Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient Egypt
and Africa, and, on the other hand, Martin
Gardiner Bernal (photo: front cover) as one of
the most challenging and innovative, but also
controversial and criticised, scholars of recent
decades. From the 1980s on, Bernal has claimed
that the roots of Western civilisation were to be
sought not in Ancient Greece but outside Europe,
in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and ultimately
in sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal has wrought havoc
in Western identity, addressing hot issues such
as racism, exclusion, cultural domination, White
and North Atlantic hegemony. He has combined a
preference for non-mainstream theories (including
Afro-centrism) with a passion for ad-hominem
arguments derived from his personal sociology of
knowledge. In this way he has blazed a trail of
polemics and conflicts throughout a considerable
number of international scholarly fields, learned
journals, and conferences.
Deriving from one such
conference, with three original contributions by
Bernal himself, and greatly expanded and updated,
the present collection as a whole does not
(contrary to the 2008 Warwick conference on
Bernal) call for canonisation of the Black
Athena thesis as a main-stream achievement of
empirical research. It does however call for
recognition of Martin Bernal as the courageous
and visionary initiator of an inspiring and
timely research programme. His Black Athena
series has greatly contributed to raising the
question of the global politics of knowledge,
from heresy, to becoming the very boundary
condition of scholarly and institutional
integrity. In this sense of maturation,
self-transcendence and limitation, we may say
that Black Athena comes of age.
Molly Myerowitz Levine,
prominent contributor to the Black Athena debate,
called the present collection when published in
the scholarly journal TALANTA ‘the
most interesting, constructive, and substantive
treatment of Black Athena to date’.
The collection Black
Athena comes of age, edited by Wim van
Binsbergen, is now in the press with LIT Verlag
(Berlin-Münster-Wien-Zürich-London). An earlier
version was published as a special issue of the
archaeological journal TALANTA in 1997. For the
present book edition, the original collection was
augmented with
Fred Woudhuizen's paper:
'The bee-sign (Evans no. 86): An instance
of Egyptian influence on Cretan
Hieroglyphic' (pp. 283-296), and with
three new texts by Wim van Binsbergen
which bring the collection up to date:
Mediterranean cameo
representing the goddess Athena, dating from the
early Common Era, and found in Meroe, N. Sudan
June 2010
Eric
Venbrux and Wim van Binsbergen at the Tiananmen
Square, Beijing, People's Republic of China,
2006; note
the setting sun in the background
Wim M.J. van
Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux are now finalising
the editing of the collective volume: New
Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second
Annual Conference of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein
(the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008. In
the process, a preprint is becoming available of:
Abstract.
This paper looks at mythological
continuities between sub-Saharan Africa
and the rest of the Old World – not
so much North Africa, but Eurasia. This
is a remarkably unusual perspective in
the field of comparative mythology: the
othering and exclusion of Africa and
Africans have been an inveterate though
obsolescent feature of North Atlantic
scholarship. The approach in this paper
is greatly inspired by Michael
Witzel’s recent work in comparative
mythology, but takes exception at his
Laurasian / Gondwana distinction, which
is predicated on absolute Eurasian /
African discontinuity. Instead, the
present argument seeks to include
sub-Saharan Africa in the standard
comparative mythology as applied to the
rest of the world. For this purpose a
two-stage argument is deployed. Since the
article is essentially a review of
several decades of the author’s
research, it risks to be unusually
auto-referential, for which apologies are
hereby offered. First, twentieth-century
interpretative schemas are discussed that
stipulate mythological continuity instead
of separation between Eurasia and
sub-Saharan Africa: Frobenius’ South
Erythraean model; cultural diffusion from
Egypt; combined cultural and demic
diffusion from sub-Saharan Africa shaping
Egyptian and subsequently Greek mythology
(Afrocentrism, Bernal’s Black
Athena thesis). Then, as background
for the latest generation of models,
indications for transcontinental
continuities are discussed from the
fields of long-range linguistics
(concentrating on Starostin’s
*Borean hypothesis, and adducing new
material concerning the place of
Niger-Congo > Bantu in the *Borean
schema), and molecular genetics: the
Out-of-Africa hypothesis, and the
Back-into-Africa hypothesis. This sets
the scene for a discussion of the
author’s Aggregative Diachronic
Model of World Mythology, suggesting that
‘Pandora’s Box’ (the
cultural heritage with which Anatomically
Modern Humans left Africa from 80 ka BP
on) contained a few identifiable basic
mythological motifs, which were
subsequently developed, transformed and
innovated in Asia, after which the
results where fed back into Africa in the
Back-into-Africa movement – the
entire process resulting in considerable
African-Eurasian continuity. After a
discussion, in regard of the last few
millennia, of the author’s Pelasgian
Model (proposing cultural including
mythological transmission from Western
Asia / the Mediterranean by the
‘cross-model’ mechanism, i.e.
in all four directions – Western
Europe; Northern Europe; the Eurasian
Steppe to South, East and South Asia; and
sub-Saharan Africa – from the Late
Bronze Age onward), the transition to the
second stage of the argument is formed by
an examination of the mythology of the
Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central
Africa, in the light of the
Aarne-Thompson classification; this again
yields results suggestive of considerable
African-Eurasian continuity. This means
that the author’s1992 analysis of
Nkoya mythology (in his book Tears of
Rain) in terms of local
protohistory, may no longer be tenable.
Contamination by recent Islamic and
Christian proselytisation is discussed
and ruled out as a major factor in
African-Eurasian mythological
continuities. To clinch the argument in
favour of massive African-Eurasian
mythological continuities, 26 Nkoya
mythemes are considered in detail against
the fully referenced background of their
global correspondences. A high degree of
African-Eurasian mythological continuity
is the argument’s main,
theoretically and empirically grounded,
conclusion. While this highlights overall
African-Eurasian cultural connections, it
particularly lends support to the
Pelasgian hypothesis, and throws in
relief unsuspected but close and
multiplex affinities between a South
Central African kingship, and the
Eurasian Steppe.
Acholi spiked wheel trap, N. Uganda
Sahara rock painting with spoke-wheeled chariot
pre-dynastic Egyptian fresco arguably showing a
spiked-wheel trap
Wim van
Binsbergen recently formulated the 'Pelasgian
hypothesis' as a useful tool to account for
transcontinental continuities throughout the Old
World from the mid-Holocene onward. A major
inspiration in this has been his re-analysis of
the global distribution of the so-called
spiked-wheel trap, a humble hunting device found
in Central Asia, the Mediterranean, and all over
Africa. The article he drafted on this topic in
2008-2009 is now ready to go to the press. A
preprint is offered here:
ABSTRACT. Reading geographical
distribution patterns and turning them
into models of historical reconstruction
of diffusion, is not only a work of
science, but also a fine art, in which
the experience gathered in the previous
analysis of similar or complementary
distributions contributes considerably to
our perception and interpretation. In the
present argument, the global distribution
of one particular item of material
culture will serve as an example of such
strategies in distributional analysis:
the spiked wheel trap, a common hunting
device in Africa and parts of Eurasia,
but apparently not attested anywhere else
in the world. Africa and Africans are
commonly depicted as totally different
from the rest of the Old World. Much of
the author’s work over the past two
decades has been aimed at combating this
misconception. The distribution pattern
of the spiked 1928 / 1935)
is so pertinent to this question, that
this implement may serve as an ‘the
e‘hypothesis localised origin in the
Neolithic Extendnd of the present argument.
The far greater incidence on African
soil, linked with the Afrocentrist wheel
trap (first analysed by Lindblom in index
fossil’ in African prehistory,
bringing out the merits of the Pelasgian
’ which the present author has
recently advanced, and which is
summarised by hypothesis according to
which major model: origin, would tempt us
to consider the spiked wheel
(a) a rathered Fertile Crescent (by which
is meant the extended region stretching
from the developments in global
cultural history have an African trap as
an African invention which gradually
trickled into Eurasia. However, this
paper argues the opposite
then still fertile Sahara to China),
probably in Central Asia;
(b) followed by spread, in the wake of
the general diffusion of pastoral and
agricultural technologies but
particularly intensified with the rise of
horse-riding and chariot technologies
– both being technological
innovations emerging in Central Asia c. 6
ka BP and 4 ka BP, respectively;
(c) not only were these pastoral
technologies responsible for cultural
spread and proto-globalising
homogenisation of the Eurasian Steppe
Belt from Anatolia to the Pacific –
from the Late Bronze Age onward they also
succeeded in making inroads into
sub-Saharan Africa, both along the Nile
valley and along Sahara dessert routes
(where rock art representations of
chariots abound from the Late Bronze Age
on).
Sparsely inhabited by hunter-gatherers
that lacked both these specific formal
cultural systems and the military
technology that privileged their owners,
the whole of sub-Saharan Africa was
available for expansion of these new
items. Hence their preponderance there in
historical times, which however is to be
interpreted in terms, not of origin, but
of the occupation of an empty niche of
cultural ecology. In the last two to
three millennia, African cultures in
sub-Saharan Africa consolidated
themselves as a result of the interaction
between Palaeo-African populations and
their cultural traits, on the one hand,
and, on the other hand, inputs from
outside Africa, including those from the
Pelasgian realm of West Asia and the
Mediterranean. The spiked wheel trap,
however insignificant in itself, is an
index fossil of the Pelasgian side of
this process. The spiked wheel trap
shares this position with a few other
formal cultural systems, such as mankala,
geomantic divination, and the belief in a
unilateral mythical being, whose similar
distributions we examine as a
stepping-stone towards a summary
presentation of the Pelasgian hypothesis.
key words: Pelasgian hypothesis; Hamitic
hypothesis; Borean hypothesis; Out of
Africa hypothesis; Back-into-Africa
hypothesis; spiked wheel trap;
distributional analysis; genetic,
linguistic and cultural continuity
Africa-Eurasia; mankala; geomantic
divination; unilateral mythical being
A spiked-wheel trap from the Amur region, S.E.
Siberia
global distribution and proposed diffusion of the
spiked-wheel trap
as argued in the paper -- revealing the Primary
Pelasgian realm and the Secondary Pelasgian realm
spiked-wheel trap from Libya
May 2010
Stephanus
Djunatan (left) conducting an interview with
shrine guardians in the prayer hall of their most
senior exponent, at the village of Rawabogo,
Ciwidey, West Java (2007)
Wim van Binsbergen (left),
Stephanus Djunatan (right) and a colleague during
a slamatan (sacrificial collective meal)
that forms part of pilgrimage at the shrine of
Nagara Padang (2010) -- note the pilgrim's
uniform; click here for full report
From 28 April to 12 May 2010
Wim van Binsbergen visited Bandung, Indonesia, in
order to finalise the supervision (jointly with
Prof. Bambang Sugiharto of the Department of
Philosophy, Catholic University Bandung (UNPAR),
and Prof. Robert Wessing of The Hague,
Netherlands) of Stephanus Djunatan's PhD thesis
in philosophy. This thesis consists of the
elaboration of The Principle of Affirmation
dealing -- on the spur of an African
methodological and theoretical inspiration,
notably the work of the lamented Odera Oruka --
with a West Javanese mountaineous pilgrimage
complex and its associated worldview, Taoism,
modern Japanese philosophy, Deleuze and Ricoeur;
the thesis is to be defended before Erasmus
University, Rotterdam, which also sponsors this
trip
In this connection Wim van
Binsbergen presented a seminar entitled 'The
crisis of meaning under conditions of
globalisation, urbanisation and
commoditification, and the reconsideration of
traditional wisdom approaches as a possible way
out -- with special attention to Africa and
Indonesia today', the Department of Philosophy,
Catholic University Bandung, Monday 10 May 2010,
16.00-17.00 hrs
while being orally adapted to
the specific Bandung situation at hand, this
seminar largely formed a truncated version of:
ABSTRACT
Wisdom is initially defined (cf.
Aristotle) as creative practical
knowledge that allows one to negotiate
the contradictions of human life
(especially in less rulegoverned domains
manifesting uncertainty and incompatible
multiple truths), thus accepting that
human life is social and finite. After
indicating (1) the resilience of wisdom
as a topic in modern thought and science,
an overview follows on wisdom in various
periods and regions of the world (2). (3)
The dilemma of expression of wisdom:
while scholarship thrives on specialist
explicit language use, wisdom is often
secret and risks being destroyed by
expression and translation. Section (4)
offsets expressions of traditional wisdom
against four modes of 'tacit modern
unwisdom' (in such fields as corporality,
conflict regulation, the concept of mind,
and myth). (5) Can wisdom be transmitted
interculturally, within and outside an
academic context, and by what mechanism
of situational oppositional framing is
traditional wisdom both an alterized
object of study and a site of
identification and encounter? (6)
Defining the specific difference between
scientific and wisdom modes of knowing,
in the former's reliance on standard,
repetitive, intersubjective procedures of
knowledge formation embedded in limiting
conditions. (7) The four modes of tacit
modern unwisdom (cf. 4) are then
contrasted with African perspectives. (8)
Finally, intercultural philosophy is
argued to spring from a situation
(today's globalization) where Western
mainstream philosophy has to give way to
a wisdom perspective as defined above.
The jointly-authored
book Researching power and identity
in African state formation, by
Martin Doornbos and Wim van Binsbergen
(500 pp.) was accepted for publication by
UNISA [ University of South Africa ]
Press, Pretoria, South Africa, in
conjunction with LIT Verlag, Berlin /
Boston / Munster
Professors Matsumura,
Berezhkin, van Binsbergen and others at
the 2nd Annual Meeting of the IACM,
Ravenstein, the Netherlands, 2008
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). Among the various options
open we can mention the following: a
volume entirely devoted to the seminal
work of the Cameroonian philosopher
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga -- which if it
could be realised would be one of the
three major publications to come out of
the Eboussi project which has been
running for the last few years, with
extensive participation of Cameroonian
scholars, and further involvement of such
prominent specialists as Prof. Procesi
(Roma), Prof. Kasereka and Prof. Mudimbe
(USA) -- , the latter a member of the Quest
Advisory Editorial Board. The
participants in this project are all of
them professionals, most of them
philosophers. This work possibly
envisaged in the Quest context would
distinguish 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. These various hommages
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 historical
background of this Botswana boom town, and to
participate in a medical panel meeting to be held
in Genk, Belgium, 19-20 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
In April 2010 bezocht
Wim van Binsbergen de stad Genk
op uitnodiging van de gemeente
Genk, en hield daar een tweetal
voordrachten:
1. een voordracht over
de verhouding tussen traditionele
en moderne biomedische
geneeskunst in Afrika, met
bijzondere nadruk op Francistown;
dit was een van de bijdragen (de
andere waren van Dr Jean-Louis
Lamboray en Dr Rituu Nanda, AIDS
specialisten; Dr Ombelet
(fertiliteitsspecialist /
gynaecoloog), en enige
verpleegkunde studenten die
onlangs een stage hadden gedaan
in Francistown op 'Een avond over
gezondheidszorg', in de grote
gehoorzaal van het Ziekenhuis
Oost Limburg (Z.O.L.) te Genk,
maandag 19 april 2010,
20.00-23.00 uur. Wim van Binsbergens
bijdrage kwam sterk overeen met
die welke hij in oktober 2009
voor studenten te Utrecht
gehouden heeft, klik hier om deze
te openen
(this is a 51 pp., 19 Mb, PDF file, which is best
first downloaded to your computer under 'Save
Target As...' rather than opened within your
browser)
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
