Part Three might not be satisfying in many ways for some of our colleagues, in particularthose 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 futurehistorians, and want to emphasise that we felt it was more important to present our Dghweɗeoral history in its fragmented entirety. Therefore the methodological approach of this book isto present and discuss our Dghweɗe notes as oral historical source material and to cast theminto written documents, rather than attempt to unpick them for reasons of ethnographiccomparison for the purpose of shaping subject-orientated universal theories. This does notimply of course that I as an ethnographer have not profited from the history of ethnographictheory, but I have decided to express my awareness of the specialisation in footnotes only, inorder 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 theDghweɗe words presented throughout Part Three. Very often there is no possiblestraightforward English translation. This obviously has to do with the aspect of culturaltranslation 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 socialor ritual circumstance. We have produced a glossary of Dghweɗe and other words at the backof 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 aspart of the process of contextualising our fragmentary Dghweɗe history. One might becomefamiliar with a Dghweɗe word in one chapter, but then have forgotten its meaning when itappears again in a slightly different context in another chapter. We hope that the glossaryhelps to resolve this problem, but want to highlight that I am not a linguist but anethnographer, which means that I look at language from the point of view of cultural meaningrather than linguistic or phonological accuracy.137
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