An Annotated Bibliography of Social Research on the Nuba Mountains
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An Annotated Bibliography of Social Research on the Nuba Mountains Edited by Enrico Ille An Annotated Bibliography of Social Research on the Nuba Mountains Edited by ENRICO ILLE With the assistance of: Konstantin Biehl Rania Awad Amira al-Jizouli Jasmin Weinert AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL RESEARCH ON THE NUBA MOUNTAINS Copyright © Chr. Michelsen Institute 2015. P.O. Box 6033 N-5892 Bergen Norway [email protected] Printed at Bodoni AS, Skjenet 10, 5354 Straume, Norway Cover photo: Rita Willaert on flickr.com Layout and design: Pernille Jørgensen ISBN 978-82-8062-572-4 Contents Table of contents ............................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................III Preface .............................................................................................................................................iv Romanization table .....................................................................................................................VII Introduction: Enrico Ille .................................................................................................................1 Category 1: Pre-colonial history .............................................................................................. 43 Category 2: Human geography and ethnographies .............................................................55 Category 3: Socio-cultural ideas and practices .................................................................... 65 Category 4: Economy and livelihoods .................................................................................... 91 Category 5: Administration and development ................................................................... 119 Category 6: Politics and conflict ............................................................................................ 149 Category 7: Reports and other documents ......................................................................... 179 i AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL RESEARCH ON THE NUBA MOUNTAINS Acknowledgements It is thanks to Abdel-Ghaffar Mohamed Ahmed, Gunnar Sørbø and Leif Manger that this bibliography came into being, financed by the project “Assisting Regional Universities in Sudan and South Sudan” (ARUSS), a cooperation between the Chr. Michelsen Institute of Bergen, the University of Bergen, the University of Khartoum, Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, the Red Sea University, the University of Kassala, the University of Gedaref, the Blue Nile University, Dilling University, and the University of Nyala. The project is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thanks are also due to other supporters of this initiative, namely Balghis Badri and my other colleagues at the Regional Institute for Gender, Diversity, Peace and Rights at Ahfad University. Special thanks go to Samia El Nagar for putting me in contact with Rania Awad, who was of invaluable assistance to this project. It was possible for this volume to come together in a few months only because of previous efforts of long-time colleagues in my research on the Nuba Mountains, most of all Richard Rottenburg and Guma Kunda Komey. The basis of this annotated bibliography is a list of references, the Nuba Mountains Bibliography, which is published and regularly updated on the website of the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Halle in Germany, as part of the Law, Organisation, Science and Technology (LOST) Research Group.1 The list was originally a bibliographical database based on two four-year research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which examined the relation of nomadic and sedentary people in South Kordofan, as well as markets and other economic institutions in the post-war period between 2005 and 2011. The projects were headed by my doctorate supervisor Richard Rottenburg and involved Guma Kunda Komey as senior researcher and myself as student assistant, and later doctoral candidate.2 The bibliographical work was also conducted by the assistants Uta Mahadi, Ronn Müller, Jasmin Weinert and Konstantin Biehl; Konstantin Biehl representing the backbone of the effort to turn the list into an annotated bibliography. Theses submitted at the University of Khartoum up to 2010 were collected by Amira al-Jizouli. Her work was continued, up until the end of 2014, by Rania Awad at other universities in Khartoum. This added substantially to the number of Arabic writings in this bibliography. 1 www.ethnologie.uni-halle.de/lost/nms 2 www.nomadsed.de/en/projects/projects-2008-2012/project-d9/index.html III Preface Ten years ago, an annotated bibliography of social research on Darfur was published, similar in intention and structure to the one at hand. Its main editor, Munzoul Assal, noted at the beginning of his introduction that “[a] humanitarian catastrophe of a serious scale is unfolding in Darfur” (Assal 2005, 4). That same year, in 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), prompting the many hopes for a better political future of the country. It is now safe to say that that future did not materialize, as the cycle of blatant violence and short-breathed agreements continues. There are now two Sudans, separated under the assumption that they have separate issues to resolve, an assumption being questioned by the militarily organized political contest and securitization of the state apparatus in the “new” South Sudan. The same kinds of grievances also persist in the “old” Sudan, addressed by the armed rebellion in the southern regions. Such grievances are not only a bitter continuity of the “southern problem,” as “the south” is still seen most of all as a problem, but also an indication that the CPA had only temporarily stopped the war between two war parties, and did not provide feasible solutions to the underlying malcontent. One of the regions suffering most as a result is that of the Nuba Mountains. Given that the subject of this bibliography is a region that experienced intensive and extensive violent conflicts for most of the last 20 years, one may question the rationale behind a bibliography listing published social research of about 100 years, especially since the many works on “root causes” of conflicts and peace-building efforts seem not to have made much of a difference on the ground. While the basic function of this bibliography is quite clear; namely, to provide an initial guide for anybody interested in social research on the Nuba Mountains, it may give readers pause to attempt to contextualize this function. As often happens, answers lie in how one individually relates to societal issues. My own motivation contains the professional academic interest to share accumulated references after ten years of experience within the region, especially in response to repeated claims of how little research has been done on the region, but goes beyond that. It connects to an issue of wider interest; namely, the issue of visibility and how it is created. Whether we apply the lens of victimhood or resistance, the lens of authenticity or creativity, the lens of social order or social ordering, makes a difference in how we get to know a place and the people that make it a place. There is value not only in studying how places and people have been made visible, but also in creating new ways in which to make them visible. The effect of such visibility has little predictability, but it is more than a whimsical effort to contribute to the perception that there is more to the places and people that make up the Nuba Mountains than remote mountains and targets. The rich history of social studies presented here bears witness to that. This being said, it is important to point out the limits of this volume. While it covers social research from 1910 to early 2015, it is neither intended as a complete catalogue of such research nor as a judgment on relevant and irrelevant publications. It merely gives a sense of “what iv AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL RESEARCH ON THE NUBA MOUNTAINS is out there” and of who has been working on the region. It is an invitation to start looking, and then find more. Through this bibliography, researchers in Sudan will be able to access information on where to find some of the listed publications in Khartoum. For the most part, only studies in English and Arabic have been included, the two languages dominating research on the Nuba Mountains; exceptions are some important ethnographic studies in German (Fritz W. Kramer and Gertraud Marx 1993; Richard Rottenburg 1991; Gerhard Hesse 2002) and French (Patricia Musa-Launay 1992), as well as the overarching work of Rolf Husmann (1984). Of the numerous unpublished theses, only those submitted for a doctoral degree have been considered here. That leaves us with a huge number of Master theses worthwhile discovering; in fact, one of the central publications on the region, R. C. Stevenson’s The Nuba people of Kordofan province (1984), is a Master thesis. The Nuba Mountains have been analyzed as a geographical region, which means that studies on people belonging to the region, but not living there (i.e., refugees and migrants located in different parts of the world), cannot be found here either. The settlement areas in northern Kordofan, such as Jabal Harāza,