Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 46
By further contextualising this controversy, we recognise that local outsiders often played an
important role as founding ancestors, and discuss the different views of our Dghweɗe
protagonists on how Mughuze-Ruwa, father of Vaghagaya, started as a local nobody. While
Mughuze-Ruwa lineages became the largest clan group not only in southern but the whole of
Dghweɗe, the less numerous descendants of Thakara of Ghwa'a remained the oldest local clan
group. However we realise that many founding legends, in particular of apical ancestors, have
very little historical value in the strict sense. For example, we conclude that quite a few of the
other associated lineages were conveniently included in the Dghweɗe house of Mbra as a
shared mythological ancestor from Tur. Despite this problem we think that we have enough
oral historical evidence to infer that Ghwa'a existed before the expansion of the Vaghagaya
lineages. We suggest in Part Two that Ghwa'a already existed during the 16th century, and
will revisit that hypothesis later across Part Three.
Before we move on to discuss the Dghweɗe relationship terms, we want to briefly reiterate
that the chapter about outsiders and founders was the first time I became fully aware of not
wanting to summarise fieldnotes to filter out the ethnographically most convenient aspects.
We therefore left the founding legends more or less as they had been written down in the first
English translation of my fieldnotes. The reason was to relay as much of the authenticity of
the field circumstance to our potential readers as possible. John Zakariya, my friend and
research assistant, translated the various Mughuze versions to me and I wrote them down.
John spoke reasonable English, and English is a second language for me also. I made the
imperfections of our original translation transparent here, and hope that the mindset of our
Dghweɗe friends as narrators still shines through. This is also why we present fieldnote
quotations only very little edited and in the ethnographic present, but use the historical present
when we subsequently discuss and attempt to ethnographically contextualise them.
The next chapter deals with relations and relationships, and we provide a provisional list of
social relationship terms. They consist of Dghweɗe words for local group formation,
exogamy rules and concepts of generational grouping across extended families, with the
nuclear family as the corporate base unit. However, we exclude one important term, which is
that of thaghaya (the seventh born) who functioned as custodian of the earth or lineage priest,
because we have a dedicated chapter to that in Part Three. This chapter on relationship terms
seriously challenged me in that I had to struggle with translating kinship terms, which are a
very important key fragment in understanding how Dghweɗe social organisation and local
group formation once unfolded. Despite the patchiness of our knowledge we can hopefully
avoid going into any theoretical discussion about the history of applying kinship terminology.
Instead I tried to stay with the field evidence given to me by my local friends.
In this comprehensive summary I am not going to go through every single one of the twenty
chapters of Part Three. Instead we want to invite the reader to start reading and to learn which
aspect of Dghweɗe culture each chapter is trying to preserve and relay. Every thematic
fragment of the oral field data presented as a chapter heading is unique and throws up its
contradictions and versions, leading to new contextualised answers or questions, which often
have to be left open. Some chapters pull loose ends together more than others, such as the
chapter on the complexities of the ritual calendar of the Dghweɗe. Other sections have many
lists, such as in the chapter ‘Working the terraced land’. Additionally, that chapter informs us
particularly of how changing agricultural techniques became relevant in modern times, and
how they contributed to the transformation of Dghweɗe ritual culture. One of the most
significant technological changes in that context seems to have been the introduction of
chemical fertilisers as opposed to animal manure. We learn here that the agricultural
importance of animal manure for terrace farming is an underlying narrative in our analysis of
the oral historical importance of manure in the Dghweɗe ritual culture.
For me, the two chapters presenting the architecture of a traditional house are very important,
and I am very pleased that I spent so much time writing them. In particular, the issue of
illustration became crucial in this chapter, which brings me to the point of how much I also
aim to present material culture as an important way of explaining how ritual culture once
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