ATrA Aree di transizione linguistiche e culturali in Africa 3 Impaginazione Gabriella Clabot © copyright Edizioni Università di Trieste, Trieste 2017. Proprietà letteraria riservata. I diritti di traduzione, memorizzazione elettronica, di riproduzione e di adattamento totale e parziale di questa pubblicazione, con qualsiasi mezzo (compresi i microfilm, le fotocopie e altro) sono riservati per tutti i paesi. ISBN 978-88-8303-821-1 (print) ISBN 978-88-8303-822-8 (online) EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste via Weiss 21 – 34128 Trieste http://eut.units.it https://www.facebook.com/EUTEdizioniUniversitaTrieste Cultural and Linguistic Transition explored Proceedings of the ATrA closing workshop Trieste, May 25-26, 2016 Ilaria Micheli (ed.) EUT EDIZIONI UNIVERSITÀ DI TRIESTE Table of contents Ilaria Micheli Shereen El Kabbani & Essam VII Introduction Elsaeed 46 The Documentation of the Pilgrimage Arts in Upper Egypt – A comparative PART I – ANTHROPOLOGY / Study between Ancient and Islamic Egypt CULTURE STUDIES Signe Lise Howell PART II – ARCHAEOLOGY 2 Cause: a category of the human mind? Some social consequences of Chewong Paul J. Lane (Malaysian rainforest hunter-gatherers) 60 People, Pots, Words and Genes: ontological understanding Multiple sources and recon-structions of the transition to food production Ilaria Micheli in eastern Africa 13 Women's lives: childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood among Ilaria Incordino the Ogiek of Mariashoni (Kenya) and 78 The analysis of determinatives the Kulango of Nassian (Ivory Coast) of Egyptian words for aromatic products Lorenza Mazzei Andrea Manzo 33 Continuity and Innovation in the 87 Bi3w Pwnt in the archaeological record. Ethiopian illustrated manuscripts: Preliminary results and perspective the case of Geometric Art of research V Dario Nappo Mauro Tosco 109 Roman attempts to control Eastern Africa 234 On counting languages, diversity-wise Chiara Zazzaro Graziano Savà 131 Maritime cultural traditions 246 Bayso, Haro and the “paucal” number: and transitions in the Red Sea history of contact around the Abbaya Marco Baldi and C'amo Lakes of South Ethiopia 147 The king Amanikhareqerem Franco Crevatin and the Meroitic world: an account 257 Due note tipologiche sulla lingua bawlé after the last discoveries (Kwa) Essam Elsaeed & Hoda Khalifa Gianfrancesco Lusini 166 A Comparative Study of Modified 264 The Costs of the Linguistic Transitions: Animal Horns in Ancient Egypt & Traces of Disappeared Languages Modern African Tribes in Ethiopia Ahmed Adam Simone Mauri 188 The Archaeology and Heritage 274 Clause chaining across the Sahara of the Sudanese Red Sea Region: Importance, findings, and challenges Kelly E. Wright 291 Accounting for Vox Populi. Adjusting Paula Veiga the Cost-Benefit Model of Language 199 Opium: was it used as a recreational Planning by Incorporating Network drug in ancient Egypt? Analysis in the Ghanaian Context Andrei Avram PART III – LINGUISTICS 306 An Early 20th-Century Arabic Maarten Mous Vocabulary as Evidence of Language 218 Language and Identity among marginal Contacts in the Uele district and the people in East Africa Redjaf-Lado Enclave VI Introduction ILARIA MICHELI Università di Trieste The ATrA Workshop on linguistic, anthropological, archaeological, histori- cal and philological issues related to areas or times in Africa characterized by phenomena of transition was held in Trieste (Italy) on May 24-26, 2016. The workshop represented the closing event of the three years inter- disciplinary ATrA project (www.africantransitions.it), funded by the Italian Ministry of Universities, Education and Research (MIUR) in the framework of its FIRB 2012 initiative. Aim of the workshop was the discussion, on an international level, of the major themes treated during these years by the ATrA team, in order to stimu- late a fruitful academic debate on the many facets of identity negotiation, ethnicity and cultural affiliation such as contact, creolization, integration, ur- banization, climate or cultural change, language and cultural switch, market exchanges, human migration and any other possible related topics. This edition contains both a collection of the papers actually discussed by the ATrA team with the invited keynote speakers during the workshop, and a selection of other contributions by scholars who answered a specific call launched in the framework of the activities of the project. The book is divided into three parts, corresponding to the three disciplines involved in the debate: anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. VII All papers present context specific, very concrete case studies which bring to light specific aspects of transition in terms of changing systems of values (in an anthropological perspective), language shifts (starting from a descrip- tive dimension) and linguistic and cultural exchanges (through the analysis of written texts and artifacts). Mechanisms of resilience and adaptation to new situations and contexts are described through an investigation which in many cases has the flavor of an intimate research, aimed above all at finding out the very essence of “be- ing human”, be it in ancient or modern contexts and in small scale or large scale societies. All the papers have been written by specialists of a determined discipline with the true aim to address scholars who could be expert in a different do- main of the human sciences with respect to their own, in order to encourage eccentric reflections and stimulate a true multi-level and multi-disciplinary dialogue. Therefore, this edition is not aimed at proposing solutions, but rather at putting on the table new hints and traces that each reader, according to her/ his specific interests, can synthesize in a “viable toolbox” allowing her/him to orient her/himself in any other contexts in transition. Due to the miscellaneous nature of the book and in order to facilitate its reading, each paper is introduced by an abstract and accompanied by a set of keywords. VIII Part I Anthropology / Culture Studies Cause: a category of the human mind?* Some social consequences of Chewong (Malaysian rainforest hunter-gatherers) ontological understanding SIGNE HOWELL University of Oslo Abstract In the absence of concepts that correspond to those of chance, luck, or fortune, how do people account for why seemingly random desirable or undesirable events occur? Based on long-term fieldwork with the Chewong, a small hunting-gathering and shifting-cultivating group of people who live in the Malaysian rain-forest, I study their theory of causality. It is argued that cause is a universal category of the human mind, but that an understanding of cause cannot be separated from an examination of the ontology and epistemology in each case. Keywords Causality, Ontology, Epistemology, Misfortune, Chewong * This paper is based on an earlier published paper entitled “Knowledge, Morality, and Causality in a ‘Luck less’ Society: The Case of the Chewong in the Malaysian Rain Forest” published in Social Analysis, Volume 56, Issue 1, Spring 2012, 133-147 © Berghahn Journals, doi:10.3167/sa.2012.560109. I am grateful to the publishers for allowing this version to be published. 2 Shortly before my arrival in 1977 to the Chewong – a small group of hunt- er-gatherers and shifting cultivators who live in the rain forest of Peninsular Malaysia – a terrible event took place1. The incident – a disastrous thunder- storm – was still at the forefront of people’s mind and I was repeatedly told about it. Several families were spending the night in temporary shelters in the forest when a heavy storm blew up, accompanied by rain, thunder and lightning A very large tree was uprooted and fell on top of the shelters. Three people were killed outright and two severely injured. Others received minor injuries. It was a frightful calamity, especially in such a small and fragile soci- ety where everyone has some kind of kinship relationship with everyone else. When I was first told about it, my reaction was that it was shockingly bad luck for the tree to fall precisely on the sleeping. However, people dismissed the notion of luck or chance. They had an explanation for why it had hap- pened and, as I learnt their ontological and metaphysical principles, I became able to account for the happening in their terms. The identified cause fits into Chewong notions of causality more generally, and I came to understand that there is no conceptual space for what I would recognize as luck or fortune. To explicate Chewong notions of causality will be the topic of this paper. From a methodological point of view, I shall be using the incident as a springboard for general methodological, theoretical and analytical speculations. Everyone I asked about the fallen tree gave me the same explanation for why it had happened there and then. It was directly linked to an event earlier the same evening. A few people had teased and laughed at some millipedes that had entered the lean-to. To laugh at or near all kinds of insects, worms, moths and butterflies is a heavily sanctioned act called talaiden. Talaiden is one of a number of named prescriptions and proscriptions that I call cosmo- rules and that constitute Chewong semantic and moral universe. Cosmo-rules provide the parameters for meaningful action. There is a direct and specified causal relationship between the infringement of one such rule and the occur- rence of an undesirable event. To perform talaiden automatically arouses the anger of the thunder spirit, Tanko, who lives above in the sky, as well as the Original Snake, who lives in the primordial sea below the earth. Whenever humans break the talaiden rule, these two beings make thunder storms, heavy rain and land slides. On this occasion, the talaiden offence of teasing milli- pedes was the direct cause of the storm and the fallen tree. Far from expressing the disaster as a misfortune – bad luck for those killed and injured to be just where the tree fell – the Chewong asserted that the transgression had caused the event to happen. Although some of those killed or injured had not participated in the breach of talaiden, this was irrelevant 1 Fieldwork with the Chewong was undertaken for 18 months during 1977-1979 with a 4-month follow-up in 1981.