Limpricht, C & M. Biesele
(eds.) (2008). Heritage and Cultures in Modern
Namibia
- In-depth Views of the Country. A TUCSIN-Festschrift.
Windhoek-Goettingen
(ISBN Europe: 9783933117397; ISBN Namibia:
9789991657271)
Content
Issues concerning the whole country
Wade Pendleton: Migration in and Urban Governance in Windhoek (9-22)
Michael Bollig: Beyond Development – Global Visions and Local
Adaptations of a Contested Concept (23-36)
Jürgen Richter & Ralf Vogelsang: Rock Art in North-Western Central Namibia
– its Age and Cultural Background (37-46)
Issues arranged along a regional approach from north
to south
Eileen Kose: “We are not Looking for Diamonds – We are Looking
for Red Stones”. Archaeology of Iron in Kavango (47-63)
Michael Pröpper: Trust, Sharing, and Cooperation in the Central
Kavango Region, North-East Namibia. Linking the Results of Experimental
Economics with Ethnographic Research (64-77)
Wilhelm Möhlig: Naming Modern Concepts in RuManyo (Bantu Language of
the Kavango) (78-89)
Hildi Hendrickson: Toward a Cross-Cultural Analysis of Dress in 19th
and 20th Century in Namibia (88-102)
Glenn Conroy: The Discovery of Otavipithecus,
Southern Africa’s first Fossil Ape (103-108)
Julia Pauli & Michael Schnegg: Living Together, Writing Together: An Ethnographic
Project on Culture and History in Fransfontein (109-115)
Megan Biesele: The Nyae Nyae Village Schools Project of the
Ju/´Hoan San: A Community-Based Education Programme in Namibia (116-126)
Richard B. Lee: A Brief Historyof the TUCSIN-Based UNAM-Toronto
Programme on Social and Cultural Aspects of HIV/AIDS (127-131)
Jason Owens and Monica Nambelela: Can’t Namibia’s (Ex)-GDR-Kids be Called
Adults in this, the Year Namibia Itself Turned 18 Years Old? (132-140)
Cornelia Limpricht & Hartmut Lang: Farms and Families – Land Tenure in
Rehoboth (141-154)
Alan Morris: The Cairns of Rehoboth, Central Namibia (155-169)
Duncan Miller: Searching for the Source of the Oanob Copper
(170-173)
Sabine Klocke-Daffa: The Modernity of Traditionalists. Culture Change, Identity
and the Impact of the State among the Namibian Khoekoen (174-182)
Ralf Vogelsang: The Rock-Shelter “Apollo 11” – Evidence of Early
Humans in South-Western Namibia (183-193)
Abstracts:
Wade Pendleton: Migration in
and Urban Governance in Windhoek (9-22)
This paper will focus on the
migration dynamics to Windhoek.
A background overview of Windhoek
is followed by a discussion of the demography and socio-economic features of Windhoek’s areas.
Migration issues are discussed including the extent of migration, where
migrants come from, where they settle, why they migrate and the impact of
HIV/AIDS on migration. The paper ends with a discussion of municipal responses
to migration since 1990.
Michael Bollig: Beyond
Development – Global Visions and Local Adaptations of a Contested Concept
(23-36)
Bollig analyses the often used terms ‛development' and 'progress' in
the context of Namibian case studies:
privatisation of rangelands in the Rehoboth community; fencing in Namibia's Eastern Otjozondjupa region; and conservancies and
community based natural resource management in Namibia's Kunene
region. He follows up the origins of the term ‛development' in early natural
sciences; its applications in early evolutionary sociology and anthropology
(two paradigms informing colonialism); and its close association with modernity
in debates about socio-economic change and attempts at its deconstruction by
social scientists in the 1990s. Taking examples from South Africa and Namibia
he goes on to juxtapose local efforts at cultural and socio-economic change
with nationally and globally defined aims and measures of development, and
finally explores how local aspirations and
global/national standards could be harmonised.
Jürgen Richter & Ralf Vogelsang: Rock
Art in North-Western Central Namibia – its Age and Cultural Background (37-46)
When it comes to rock art, Namibia is among the most prominent areas
on earth. The multiple relations between archaeological findings and landscapes
permit a detailed reconstruction of human land-use in central Namibia during
the second and first millennium BC. The individual ecological zones and regions
correspond to different functions within the settlement system of a highly
mobile hunter-gatherer society. The authors give detailed account of motifs,
styles and modes as well as of regional distribution of rock art in Namibia. They conclude with an outline of the cultural
sequences in north-western Central Namibia during the last 10,000 years.
Eileen Kose: “We are not
Looking for Diamonds – We are Looking for Red Stones”. Archaeology of Iron in
Kavango (47-63)
1500 years ago the first iron producers of Namibia were
found close to the Kavango river. They seemed culturally attached to the Okavango delta. Archaeological evidence from centuries
before proves that present Kavango people settled themselves in the Kavango 500
years ago. Their knowledge and traditions about iron producing and processing
are closely connected with the people of southern Angola. In the 20th
century these techniques of metallurgy had nearly fallen into oblivion due to
increasing migrant labour work. Research between 2005 and 2007 focused on
archaeological remains of former iron smelting sites as well as on oral
histories in order to reconstruct the history of metallurgy in the Kavango.
Michael Pröpper: Trust,
Sharing, and Cooperation in the Central Kavango Region, North-East Namibia.
Linking the Results of Experimental Economics with Ethnographic Research
(64-77)
To establish sustainable institutions for the protection of
threatened biological resources - e.g. timber - people in the Kavango Region of
Namibia
cannot rely on state control alone. A successful management requires
self-management and self-control based on collective action which again must be
grounded on the awareness that the valuable resources of Kavango need to be
saved. Collective action is based on intra community trust and social cohesion.
Existing community based natural resource management concepts tend to
overestimate these factors and presuppose the existence of communities where
there are villages. This article explores the willingness of villagers to trust
each other and to cooperate by outlining the results of various economic
experiments that have been conducted in the Kavango. By looking at the
constraints that actors express the paper explores and explains the limits of
'Communities'. This is crucial information for any future project design.
Wilhelm Möhlig: Naming Modern
Concepts in RuManyo (Bantu Language of the Kavango) (78-89)
In comparison with other Bantu languages, RuManyo has proved to be
very flexible in adjusting to the communicative needs of modern life. There are
nowadays own terms at hand for all semantic fields, be it politics, government,
science, medicine, arts, linguistics, agriculture etc. This wealth of specific
terms could only be achieved by systematic language planning and engineering.
However, the etymological history of many names denoting technical or trade
items shows that the spirit of modernization and the readiness of the RuManyo
speaking population for constant adjustment must be older than the period of
colonial influence. On the basis of the relevant lexicon we can distinguish
several periods of terminological adjustment and innovation.
During the different periods of history, various African and
European contact languages became dominant, such as Afrikaans, English, German,
Herero, Kwangali, Nyemba, and Portuguese. It is interesting to note that the
preference for specific strategies and techniques of coining new names seems to
coincide with single historical periods. In this contribution, we demonstrate
the various strategies with the help of practical examples and also discuss the
aspect of interrelationship between history and the techniques of coining new
terms.
Hildi Hendrickson: Toward a
Cross-Cultural Analysis of Dress in 19th and 20th Century
in Namibia (88-102)
Namibia has had rich pre-colonial clothing
traditions, a colonial history in which dress has played an integral part and a
post-colonial landscape in which dress continues to be a critical medium for the
assertion of social and political identities. First however, a comprehensive
account of pre-colonial dress and adornment in the region must be given. In
this paper, the author begins to synthesize cross-cultural details on dress
culled from primary 19th and early 20th century sources. Among
her findings are that indigenous people in what is now Namibia used an
incredible and mostly unremarked-upon array of materials found in the natural
environment in their construction of dress. By looking
at multiple cultures in the region, it is possible to begin to characterize the
differing factors affecting a change in self and social representation.
Glenn Conroy: The Discovery
of Otavipithecus, Southern Africa’s
first Fossil Ape (103-108)
The discovery of Otavipithecus namibiensis
from Berg Aukas (near Grootfontein) is arguably the most significant fossil
find ever made in Namibia, and one of the most important from southern Africa.
It provided the first, and still the only, incontrovertible evidence that pre-human
"apes" roamed the southern African veld millions of years before the
first australopiths made their appearance in the region. It is the only Miocene
hominoid ever discovered on the African continent south of equatorial East
Africa.
Julia Pauli & Michael Schnegg: Living
Together, Writing Together: An Ethnographic Project on Culture and History in
Fransfontein (109-115)
The central aim of this
ethnographic research project is to explore similarities between people of
different ethnic origin. In collaboration with five local researchers, Fiona
Ilonga, Francois Dawids, Titus Kaumunika, Jorries Seibeb and Otto /Uirab, we
have elicited oral histories, expert interviews and visual material to document
the culture of sharing in Fransfontein, a multiethnic community in Northwestern Namibia. While the public discourses in
Fransfontein all too often stress the differences between ethnic groups, many
cultural practices are shared by the multiethnic people of Fransfontein.
Similarities can be observed for example in common marriage rituals, shared
healing knowledge and similar food customs. Sharing creates similarity and eventually
leads to feelings of belonging and identity.
Megan Biesele:
