Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 139
Part Three might not be satisfying in many ways for some of our colleagues, in particular
those who rely heavily on theoretical comparison, and they will miss that aspect in this book.
We can only apologise for this, but we feel that such comparison could still be made by future
historians, and want to emphasise that we felt it was more important to present our Dghweɗe
oral history in its fragmented entirety. Therefore the methodological approach of this book is
to present and discuss our Dghweɗe notes as oral historical source material and to cast them
into written documents, rather than attempt to unpick them for reasons of ethnographic
comparison for the purpose of shaping subject-orientated universal theories. This does not
imply of course that I as an ethnographer have not profited from the history of ethnographic
theory, but I have decided to express my awareness of the specialisation in footnotes only, in
order to maintain the narrative authenticity of this history from the grassroots.
Finally, we would like to give some practical advice on how to cope with the intricacies of the
Dghweɗe words presented throughout Part Three. Very often there is no possible
straightforward English translation. This obviously has to do with the aspect of cultural
translation of the Dghweɗe view of the world which is rooted in an oral culture of the precolonial past. Therefore we often have several translations depending on the particular social
or ritual circumstance. We have produced a glossary of Dghweɗe and other words at the back
of the book to which the reader can refer. There is also the aspect of learning through reading,
and many of the Dghweɗe words and their underlying meanings are mentioned repeatedly as
part of the process of contextualising our fragmentary Dghweɗe history. One might become
familiar with a Dghweɗe word in one chapter, but then have forgotten its meaning when it
appears again in a slightly different context in another chapter. We hope that the glossary
helps to resolve this problem, but want to highlight that I am not a linguist but an
ethnographer, which means that I look at language from the point of view of cultural meaning
rather than linguistic or phonological accuracy.
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