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9780299358006 Academic Inspection Copy

Gather Your Ancestors

Gender, Language, and Belonging in Southeast Africa
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Southeasternmost Africa is 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 interaction, and social development in this region. Taking a historical linguistics approach to Nguni, she sheds new light on this history by focusing on Nguni speakers' use of gendered practices-including initiation, marriage, and avoidant speech known as hlonipha-to blend multilingual and culturally 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 still impact and remain visible in Southeastern African communities today, and understanding them is vital to understanding the region's long history and current society.
Raevin Jimenez is an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
List of Illustrations Preface Note on Spelling and Reconstructed Forms Introduction 1. Antiquating Ancestry: Mobility and Gendered Social Transformation, Ninth Century 2. Being Southeastern in a Social Mosaic: Regional Ties, Ancestral Roots, and Gendered Decorum in the Making of Togetherness, Tenth-Eleventh Centuries 3. Scattered Households, Nested Women: Gender and Mobile Communities in the Southeastern Uplands, Eleventh-Thirteenth Centuries 4. Gathering Men and Collecting Help in the Southeast Woodlands, Eleventh-Sixteenth Centuries 5. Dominion of Youths: Gender, Materiality, and Elite Groupwork in the Upper Southeast Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
"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
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