Academic literature on the topic 'African mythology'

Our analytical catalogue contains information on many thousands of folklore and mythological texts. The systemic approach to this material argues in favor of an African origin of episodes and images that were recorded in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indo-Pacific border of Asia and in America but are absent in continental Eurasia. Such a pattern corresponds to genetic and archaeological data concerning the early spread of the modern human from Africa in two directions, i.e. to the East along the coast of the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia and Australia, and to the North into Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. The natural conditions of humankind in the Indo-Pacific Tropics and in the African homeland are essentially similar; conversely, in the Eurasian North, deep cultural changes and a loss of the African heritage are to be expected. Though there are no cultures in Asia that could be considered to be related to the ancestors of the earliest migrants into the New World still being identified by archaeologists, similar sets of motifs in South America and in the Indo-Pacific part of the Old World provide evidence in favor of the East Asian homeland of the first Americans. Later groups of migrants brought those motifs typical for continental Eurasia to North America. Though we take into account conclusions reached by specialists in other historical disciplines, big data on mythology and folklore is argued to be an independent source of information on the human past.

Traditions that share the least number of motifs are located in continental Eurasia and Melanesia. African mythologies are poor and stand nearer to the Indo‑Pacific than to the Continental Eurasian pole. The Indo‑Pacific mythology preserved its African core. In Continental Eurasia a new set of motifs began to spread after the Late Glacial Maximum. Both sets of motifs were brought to the New World. The Indo-Pacific complex predominates in Latin, the Continental Eurasian one in North America. Sky‑maiden tales, largely unknown in Africa and Australia, emerged in the Indo-Pacific borderlands of Asia. Both in Southeast Asia and in Latin America different images of the magic wife coexist (different birds, sky-nymphs, etc.), stories are often integrated into the anthropogenic myths. More specialized Swan-maiden stories spread across Northern Eurasia after the Late Glacial Maximum. Only Khori‑Buryat versions are related to actual mythology. Swan‑maiden was brought to America late by the Eskimo.

Although the practice of human sacrifice is not new in the mythology around sacrifice in Africa, the practice of child mutilation and sacrifice at least in Uganda was just spoken about as fairytale. However events that have unraveled since the late 1990s have shocked the country with real cases of children being mutilated and killed in the context of what is commonly referred to as child sacrifice in Uganda. This paper presents the “African” meaning of the concept sacrifice and how demonstrates how the in African religious theology disassociates itself from murder and mutilation of children‟s body parts as part of the rituals for healing, dealing misfortunes or even prevention of unfortunate events. There was consensus from our study participants that although historically, there has been human and child sacrifice in the African and Uganda cultural mythology, the actual practice of these vices is a new phenomenon, not recognized and accepted in indigenous/traditional religious theology and practice of African religion and culture.

Pasolini's Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (1970) is a metaphorical film, inspired by the Greek legend of Orestes, in which Pasolini views postcolonial African history through the lens of mythology. His portrait of the birth of “modern” Africa is an attempt to narrate the passage from past to present and to salvage "prehistory" through his dream of the unification of the rational, democratic state and the irrational, primal slate of being. It is, however, a dream punctuated by contradictions and paradoxes, a dream which Pasolini will later abandon. Yet it is significant in the overall development of Pasolini's genre.

With the publication of Black Cultural Mythology (2020), the discipline of Africology and African American Studies has a better resource that answers the call for methodological and theoretical tools to institutionalize Africana cultural memory studies as a robust subfield. This content analysis tests the applicability of the critical framework of Black cultural mythology—which emerges from a study of the African American Diaspora of the United States—with the Afroeuropean Diaspora, namely the Black British experience. A feature of this study’s methodology is evaluating the efficacy of the genre of anthology—in this case Kwesi Owusu’s Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (2000)—as a comprehensive source suitable for content analysis and from which to infer a sense of the region’s approaches to cultural memory and memory-adjacent worldviews.

This article explores the nexus of themes of sexual desire, gender and prayer in the Bemba mythology of creation. Approached from Sarah Coakley’s theology of participation in the divine desire, the article utilizes email technique to collect data from African scholars both women and men with an intention to find out their perspectives on the nexus of the entangled themes above as embodied within the widespread Bemba mythology. The second objective was to understand the ways in which these three themes are intersected in the mythology and demonstrate how the contemporary African Christian search for gender and sexual desire justice might be linked to a gendered prayer. The findings show that gendered prayer could be a place of sexual desire and gender healing and justice for women.

The article investigates the dialectics between homeland and identity in the poetry of the Sudanese poet, Mohamed Al-Fayturi and his literary master, Langston Hughes in order to underline their attitudes toward crucial issues integral to the African and African-American experience such as identity, racism, enslavement and colonisation. The article argues that – in Hughes’s early poetry –Africa is depicted as the land of ancient civilisations in order to strengthen African-American feelings of ethnic pride during the Harlem Renaissance. This idealistic image of a pre-slavery, a pre-colonial Africa, argues the paper, disappears from the poetry of Hughes, after the Harlem Renaissance, to be replaced with a more realistic image of Africa under colonisation. The article also demonstrates that unlike Hughes, who attempts to romanticize Africa, Al-Fayturi rejects a romantic confrontation with the roots. Interrogating western colonial narratives about Africa, Al-Fayturi reconstructs pre-colonial African history in order to reveal the tragic consequences of colonisation and slavery upon the psyche of the African people. The article also points out that in their attempts to confront the oppressive powers which aim to erase the identity of their peoples, Hughes and Al-Fayturi explore areas of overlap drama between the turbulent experience of African-Americans and the catastrophic history of black Africans dismantling colonial narratives and erecting their own cultural mythology.

Water in its various forms–as salty ocean water, as sweet river water, or as rain–has played a major role in human myths, from the hypothetical, reconstructed stories of our ancestral “African Eve” to those recorded some five thousand years ago by the early civilizations to the myriad myths told by major and smaller religions today. With the advent of agriculture, the importance of access to water was incorporated into the preexisting myths of hunter-gatherers. This is evident in myths of the ancient riverine civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, as well as those of desert civilizations of the Pueblo or Arab populations.

AbstractAfrican film directors have made use of mythology and oral storytelling in countless circumstances. These filmmakers have explored the core role that orality plays in ideas of African identity and used mythological themes as allegorical forms in order to address present-day issues while working under dictatorial regimes. They have turned to mythology and oral storytelling because of their determination to convey an African philosophical approach to the world, often to counter the colonial and neo-colonial oversimplification of African cultures seen as bereft of grand narratives on the self and the world. Identity construction, critical allegorical messages, and philosophical approaches are discussed in this paper by looking at the interplay between verbal narrative and images in two “epic” films: Keïta, l'héritage du Griot (1995) directed by Dani Kouyaté, and Yeelen (1987) directed by Souleymane Cissé.

Hallett, a painting by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, and a sculpture by Claudette Schreuders. It argues that these portraits each symbolise Head to a certain degree: Hallett wanted to capture the Artist in Exile; Nkosi wanted to capture a Struggle Hero; and Schreuders wanted to capture a Fellow South African. This paper is interested in how all three of these artists – although to different ends and effects – each mythologise Bessie Head, and how this relates to a broader project of national mythology. In this way, this analysis hopes to contribute to a greater understanding of Bessie Head in the cultural imagination of South Africa.

Bibliography: pages 364-375.
The field work for this thesis was never a "safe" project, but a very important one it a people's heritage (the Vakavango heritage), which includes memories of generations of migration and therefore some potentially highly informative data, was not to be lost. The project, concerned with the traditions of a people living on both sides of the Kavango river, on the border of Angola and Namibia, began when the Angolan civil war was already in full swing on the northern bank and the liberation struggle was already heating up in Namibia. The first purpose was to produce a definitive version of the most important myth cycle of the Vakavango, the myth in which Tjakova is the chief actor. The second purpose was to subject the myth to analysis as one expression of these peoples' religion. These two purposes are interactive. To decide what must be included and what excluded in a definitive version of the myth is to have already begun analysis.

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Este trabalho teve como objetivo principal analisar a contribuição da mitologia africana como instrumento educativo de maneira interdisciplinar na educação de pessoas jovens e adultas (EJA). Foram focalizadas as metáforas contidas nos mitos africanos como elementos relevantes de articulação com o cotidiano dos sujeitos da EJA. Assim sendo, espera-se que a mitologia africana, articulada com os conteúdos escolares, possibilite às educandas e aos educandos maior compreensão dos conceitos científicos, quando estes partem de histórias orais produzidas pela humanidade para explicar a criação do mundo; a nossa existência e os ciclos da natureza; a vida e morte e outros temas. Deste modo, realizou-se uma pesquisa bibliográfica, seguida de uma análise crítica e reflexiva sobre as temáticas em questão e, posteriormente, seguindo o mesmo rigor científico analisou-se uma atividade educativa aplicada em sala de aula da educação de jovens e adultos do quinto ano do período noturno. Os resultados das análises das pesquisas demonstraram que a inserção da mitologia africana no ambiente escolar é potencializadora no processo de aprendizagem dos conteúdos científicos; a partir do momento em que os sujeitos da EJA conseguem perceber a articulação entre a metáfora e o conhecimento científico durante a participação no desenvolvimento das atividades educativas. Os resultados trouxeram elementos importantes, pois mostram a necessidade de um estudo mais aprofundado sobre as metáforas contidas nos mitos africanos, uma vez que, nem sempre é possível fazer essa articulação com facilidade. A pesquisa evidenciou a necessidade de mais pesquisas e leituras por parte dos professores para que a articulação entre o conteúdo científico e a metáfora seja perceptível durante a aplicação das atividades, consequentemente, para que os próprios estudantes consigam interagir e dialogar sobre o conteúdo científico e potencializar a aprendizagem.
This work aimed to analyze the contribution of African mythology as an educational tool as an interdisciplinary form in the education of youths and adults (EJA).The metaphors contained in the African myths were focused as relevant elements of articulation into the daily life of the students of the EJA. Thus, it is hoped that African mythology, articulated with school content, will enable learners to better understand scientific concepts, when they depart from oral histories produced by human kind to explain the creation of the world; our existence and the cycles of nature; life and death and other themes. In this way, a bibliographical research was carried out, followed by a critical and reflexive analysis on the subjects in question and, later, following the same scientific rigor an educational activity was applied in a fifth year classroom of the education of youths and adults of the night period. The results of the analysis of the researches showed that the insertion of the African mythology in the school environment is potentiating the process of learning the scientific contents; from the moment in which the students of the EJA can understand the articulation between the metaphor and the scientific knowledge during the participation in the development of the educative activities. The results have brought important elements, since they show the need for a more in-depth study of the metaphors contained in African myths, since it is not always possible to make this articulation with ease. The research evidenced the need for more research and reading by the teachers so that the articulation between the scientific content and the metaphor is perceptible during the application of the activities, consequently, so that the students themselves can interact and dialogue about the scientific content and potentialize the Learn.

Esta dissertação aponta para um caminho cuja trajetória é a busca e o entendimento da complexidade da arte e da cultura africana, especialmente da África subsaariana e, dessa forma, contribuir para uma reflexão sobre a formação da cultura brasileira nos seus modos de ser e de pensar, através das características atribuídas aos descendentes de africanos que para o Brasil foram trazidos na condição de escravos. Nosso ponto de partida é a religiosidade de matriz africana reinventada no Brasil, e o motivo pelo qual a escolhemos como base, sem nos aprofundarmos em seus significados, é que ela guarda, mesmo que recriados, traços importantes da linguagem e de um modo de ser que refletem uma maneira muito peculiar característica dos habitantes daquele continente. Aportando nossos estudos no citado território, especialmente nos sítios dos iorubás (Nigéria, principalmente), dos fons (Benim) e dos tchokwes (Angola e Congo), utilizamos a arte não somente como uma maneira de expressão da cultura, mas também apresentando a produção escultórica como uma forma de dialogar com a mitologia. História, arte, mitologia, ancestralidade, poesia e educação africana estão presentes nesta pesquisa que também visa contribuir com as Leis 10639/03 e 11.645/08, de ensino de história e culturas africanas e afro-brasileiras nas salas de aula.
This work points to a path whose trajectory is seeking and understanding of the complexity of art and African culture, especially Sub-Saharan Africa and thereby contribute to a reflection on the formation of Brazilian culture in their ways of being and thinking, through the characteristics attributed to the descendants of Africans who were brought to Brazil as slaves. Our starting point is the religiosity of African reinvented in Brazil, and the reason we chose as the base, without delving into their meanings, is that she keeps, even recreated important features of language and a way of being that reflect a very peculiar characteristic of the inhabitants of that continent. Bringing our studies in the said territory, especially in sites Yoruba (Nigeria, mostly), the fons (Benin) and tchokwes (Angola and Congo), we use the art not only as a way of expression of culture, but also showing the production sculpture as a form of dialogue with the mythology. History, art, mythology, ancestry, poetry and African education are present in this study also aims to contribute to the Laws 10639/03 and 11.645/08, teaching history and African cultures and african-Brazilian classrooms.

Among the Yoruba àjé&dotbelow; is the primordial force of causation and creation. Àjé&dotbelow; is the power of the feminine, of female divinity and women, and àjé&dotbelow; is the women themselves who wield this power. Unfortunately, àjé&dotbelow; has been translated witch/witchcraft with attendant malevolent connotations. Though the fearsome nature of àjé&dotbelow; cannot be denied, àjé&dotbelow; is a richly nuanced term. Examination of Yoruba sacred text, Odu Ifa, reveals àjé&dotbelow; to be an endowment gifted to female divinity from the Source of Creation. Female divinity empowered their mortal daughters with àjé&dotbelow;—spiritual and temporal power exercised in religious, judicial, political, and economic domains throughout Yoruba history. However, in contemporary times àjé&dotbelow; have been negatively branded as witches and attacked.

The dissertation investigates factors contributing to the duality in attitude towards àjé&dotbelow; and factors that contributed to the intensified representation of their fearsome aspects to the virtual disavowal of their positive dimensions. Employing transdisciplinary methodology and using multiple lenses, including hermeneutics, historiography, and critical theory, the place of àjé&dotbelow; within Yoruba cosmology and historical reality is presented to broaden understanding and appreciation of the power and role of àjé&dotbelow; as well as to elucidate challenges to àjé&dotbelow;. Personal experiences of àjé&dotbelow; are spoken to within the qualitative interviews. Individuals with knowledge of àjé&dotbelow; were interviewed in Yorubaland and within the United States.

Culture is not static. A critical reading of Odu Ifa reveals the infiltration of patriarchal influence. The research uncovered that patriarchal evolution within Yoruba society buttressed and augmented by the patriarchy of British imperialism as well as the economic and social transformations wrought by colonialism coalesced to undermine àjé&dotbelow; power and function.

In our out-of-balance world, there might be wisdom to be gleaned from beings that were given the charge of maintaining cosmic balance. Giving proper respect and honor to "our mothers" (awon iya wa) who own and control àjé&dotbelow;, individuals are called to exercise their àjé&dotbelow; in the world in the cause of social justice, to be the guardians of a just society.

Imagine for a moment waking up one morning to find that what or with whom you had come to identify racially was built on a foundation of ambiguities, silences, deceptions and sacred secrets. This scenario offers snapshot of Effa Louisa Brooks Manley’s life on the color line. Manley, former co-owner of the Negro League Baseball franchise (1935-1948), the Newark Eagles, disrupts American notions about what it means to be Black or white. A white mother and two black stepfathers raised her with her siblings as a Negro. However, it was not until Manley was a teenager that her mother revealed to her that her biological father also racially identified as white. This study examines the way Effa Manley performed identity at the boundaries of blackness and whiteness from the turn of the 20th century through 1945. I argue that Manley was more than a white woman who simply passed for Black. She reconciled being Black and becoming white, by exploiting the American mythology of race and culturally identified as a Negro. I explore how her self-identification complicates racial and ethnic belonging, by analyzing the identity choices she made while traversing the fault lines of race in her early life as well as the way she performed identity in the interviews she gave before her death in 1981.

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This work aims to provide for scholars psychologists of gerontology and professionals from various areas, an analysis of old age, taking into account the assumptions of analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung and Jungian mythology, thus providing more insight about aging, expanding the study this theme, yet so unknown. The deities are here seen as archetypal models, ways of aging, pointing to the individuation process described in Jung's work. To have that in the light of African mythology and analytical psychology there is interrelation between the issues, thus bringing another conception of aging
Este trabalho visa proporcionar para psicólogos estudiosos da gerontologia e profissionais das diversas áreas, uma análise da velhice, levando em conta os pressupostos da psicologia analítica de Carl Gustav Jung e a mitologia junguiana, desta forma fornecendo mais uma visão acerca do envelhecimento, ampliando o estudo deste tema, ainda tão desconhecido. Os orixás são aqui vistos como modelos arquetípicos, formas de envelhecimento, que apontam para o processo de individuação descrito na obra de Jung. Têm-se que à luz da mitologia africana e a psicologia analítica há inter relação entre as temáticas, trazendo, assim, outra concepção sobre o envelhecimento

This thesis explores the trickster character through the lens of his role as a cultural hero. The two characters that I chose to examine are from North American myth, specifically Winnebago Hare and Brer Rabbit. These two characters represent the duality of the trickster while simultaneously embodying the lauded abilities of the hero. Through their actions these two characters shape culture through the very action of disrupting societal norms.

Les thèmes marins englobent la mythologie marine, les poissons et les bateaux, qu'ils soient de pêche, de commerce ou de guerre. Ils nous ont servi de leitmotive pour suivre le développement de l'Art de la mosaïque depuis ses origines en Mésopotamie jusqu'à la Province d'Afrique en suivant les routes empruntées par Rome. La réalisation d'un catalogue exhaustif étant illusoire nous l'avons essentiellement constitué de mosaïques que nous avons nous-même pu voir et admirer. Ceci a déséquilibré notre collection au profit des mosaïques tunisiennes plus faciles d'accès. L'époque concernée est celle de la conquête et de la domination romaine en Afrique de 146 av. J.- C. à 533 apr. J.-C. Ce suivi en images de pierre retrace une histoire parallèle entre celle de Rome et le devenir de la mosaïque en Afrique du Nord correspondant au Maroc, à l'Algérie, à la Tunisie et à la Libye d'aujourd'hui, où se trouvent concentrées ses expressions des plus précieuses et des plus représentatives et où les thèmes marins furent particulièrement appréciés
The marine genre representations on mosaics include marine mythology, fishes and boats for fishing trade or war. We were using them as pretexts to follow the development of the mosaic Art since its origin in Mesopotamia till it reached the African Province following the roads used by Rome. The fulfillment of an exhaustive catalogue being an illusion we have built it mainly with mosaics that we were able to see and to admire by ourselves. Therefore our collection is unbalanced to the benefit of mosaics from Tunisia where traveling was easier. The concerned time period corresponds to the roman conquest and domination from 146 BC to 533 AD. This follow up in stone pictures is describing parallel historical lines between ROME and the progress of mosaic in septentrional Africa corresponding to actual Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, where are concentrated very valuable and representative expressions and where the marine genre representations were mostly estimated

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.