Gather Your Ancestors

Gender, Language, and Belonging in Southeast Africa

AvRaevin Jimenez

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

Del i serien Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture

1 007 kr

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Beskrivning

Historically, southeasternmost Africa has been home to a large variety of speech communities, including Nguni, East Bantu, Khoi, and San—the legacy of a long and complicated history of migration, interaction, assimilation, and disaggregation between many peoples. With detailed, careful analysis, Raevin Jimenez guides readers through a thousand years of human movement, cultural contact, and social development in this region. Taking a historical linguistics approach, she sheds new light on this history by focusing on Nguni speakers' use of gendered practices—including initiation, marriage, and avoidant speech known as hlónipha—to blend multilingual and diverse communities.Use of gendered institutions inaugurated variable social spaces that could either elide or accommodate difference and thus enabled a multiplicity of community types. Contrary to previous assumptions about the roles of men and women in precolonial southeasternmost Africa, Jimenez shows that gender impacted life and social interactions across a large variety of important domains and became a way of forming, negotiating, and maintaining community. These developments shaped and remain visible in southeastern African speech communities today, and understanding them is vital to understanding the region's long history and current linguistic society.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-08-18
Mått:152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture
Antal sidor:300
Förlag:University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN:9780299358006

Utforska kategorier

Genusvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik
Afrikas historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Mer om författaren

Raevin Jimenez is an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.

Recensioner i media

“The most important work on precolonial South Africa in over a decade. A daring examination of historical linguistics that rewrites and reconceptualizes the region’s past.” - Paul S. Landau, author of Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries "Brilliantly places practices of gendered comportment and respectability at the center of the political and social history of southern Africa across more than a millennium, changing what we thought we knew about everything from early demographic processes to Zulu and Xhosa practices of power centuries later. A tour de force!" - Kathryn de Luna, author of Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa

Innehållsförteckning

List of IllustrationsPrefaceNote on Spelling and Reconstructed FormsIntroduction1. Antiquating Ancestry: Mobility and Gendered Social Transformation, Ninth Century2. Being Southeastern in a Social Mosaic: Regional Ties, Ancestral Roots, and Gendered Decorum in the Making of Togetherness, Tenth–Eleventh Centuries3. Scattered Households, Nested Women: Gender and Mobile Communities in the Southeastern Uplands, Eleventh–Thirteenth Centuries4. Gathering Men and Collecting Help in the Southeast Woodlands, Eleventh–Sixteenth Centuries5. Dominion of Youths: Gender, Materiality, and Elite Groupwork in the Upper SoutheastConclusionAppendixNotesBibliographyIndex

Häftad

244 kr