Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 218
appear in our Dghweɗe agricultural calendar not only possessed functional elements of
belonging as applications for local group formation, but also carried an oral historical
message of how the Dghweɗe ethnogenesis came about.
Our reconstruction of the Dghweɗe calendar presented below will show how the seasonality
of farming activities was interlinked with rituals, of which not only the planting and
harvesting period was crucial, but also the period of preparing the land and manuring the soil.
Between harvest and the next planting season was the slaughtering season. The latter was
when most sacrifices and festivals were performed, and we will learn later in Part Three that
quite a few of them had ceased being performed. The Dghweɗe bull festival and the adult
initiation ceremonies (dzum zugune) are the two main examples of that, and we had to
reconstruct them from the oral memories of our Dghweɗe protagonist friends.
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