Post by Noah on Jul 30, 2011 20:36:58 GMT -5
As you know, there is a lot of resistance in some of the academic literature to the idea of a separate Hamitic racial group/the Hamitic reality. Just about all of this literature is of an unscientific, polemical nature, whereby we Hamites are proclaimed not to exist and are callously dismissed as a 'myth'. And not through empirical observation either, but rather by official decree. Much of this 'work' is, of course, bollocks -- our existence alone more than proves that.
But I'm not sure how many forum members are aware of just how utterly dishonest a lot of that literature also is. Scholars have noticed this too and condemned it.
Let's start by quoting one of them, the venerable American anthropologist, historian and linguist Harold C. Fleming, a specialist on the cultures and people of the Horn of Africa. In a book review, Fleming dissects an early work titled Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts by one Christopher Ehret, a linguist who has made a career of re-assigning Hamitic achievements to Negroid populations (particularly Nilotes, whom he seems rather fond of). In the process, Fleming deftly explains the emergence of anti-Hamitic bias and prejudice among post-colonial scholars in North America:
But I'm not sure how many forum members are aware of just how utterly dishonest a lot of that literature also is. Scholars have noticed this too and condemned it.
Let's start by quoting one of them, the venerable American anthropologist, historian and linguist Harold C. Fleming, a specialist on the cultures and people of the Horn of Africa. In a book review, Fleming dissects an early work titled Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts by one Christopher Ehret, a linguist who has made a career of re-assigning Hamitic achievements to Negroid populations (particularly Nilotes, whom he seems rather fond of). In the process, Fleming deftly explains the emergence of anti-Hamitic bias and prejudice among post-colonial scholars in North America:
The problem of contacts with which the book is concerned is that of the notorious Hamites and their alleged impact on East African peoples other than the Nilotes. In addition, Ehret advances hypotheses about great expansions of East Sudanic pastoralists in the Middle Nile Basin, including an important impact on Eastern Cushitic itself. In the most general sense this book represents the background from which the first book is essentially an elaborated derivative. Of its sixty-one pages, exclusive of notes and tables (thirty-two pages where the evidence is concentrated), thirty-nine are devoted to Southern Cushites, Eastern Cushites, and "Purported Cushites." Another nine pages discuss "Nilo-Hamites" and "Megalithic Cushites." Thus we have a book ostensibly aiming to denigrate the Cushites but giving seventy-seven percent of its space to them and their donations to other peoples, while less than a quarter of the book concerns the East Sudanic expansion. Some of the pages devoted to the Cushites might have been used more fruitfully to look into the impact, or lack of it, of the Central Sudanic peoples on the Lacustrine area and possibly southwestern Ethiopia. In any case, declaring that the Hamites/Cushites have been overrated, the author shows how important they have been in linguistic fact, then concludes that the East Sudanic peoples are really the ones who have been important. Is Ehret putting us on?[...] Ehret's argument is misleading and brimful of half-truths and presumptions[...] The only reason I see for Ehret to exorcise the Hamites from East African history is to establish his ideological purity. In my opinion, however, it is time to arrest a quarter of a century of excessive anti-Hamitism in African studies. Greenberg, characteristically mild in his strictures, was the first to argue against the tendency to glorify conquering Caucasoid cattlemen or Hamitic Herrenvolk as race language-culture types ancestral to anyone who conquered or looked vaguely Caucasoid or cherished cattle. Thus the pains he took with the genetic linguistic classification of such languages as Fulani, Masai, Nandi or Suk, and Hottentot were meant to show negative associations between pastoralism and Hamitic languages. In the case of Hausa and the other Chadic languages, Greenberg was trying to show that languages properly "Hamitic," that is, members of the Hamito-Semitic genetic linguistic phylum, could be spoken by peoples who did not particularly stress pastoralism or look particularly "Hamitic." By this, of course, was meant Caucasoid, but not just any Caucasoid. Hamitic as a catchall category always seems to presuppose biological resemblance to the ancient Egyptians, modern Berbers, or the better known Ethiopid types such as Beja, highland Abyssinians, Galla, or Somali. Moreover, Hamites had a sort of family resemblance to Semites, a group not only Asian in origin, but also indubitably Caucasoid ("White"). Oddly enough, it was Americans of Semitic ancestry, combating the virulent anti-Semitism of Germany under Nazism as a matter of ethnic survival and racism in anthropology, psychology, and the social sciences as a matter of principle -- their attacks were not unrelated to general Euro-American social prejudice against Jews as well -- who initially began anti-Hamitism in recent Africanist scholarship. There is irony here[...] Few could gainsay the general benefits of anti-racism in anthropology or African history. Biological anthropology has certainly cleared away much intellectual rubbish due to racism, as have cultural anthropology and psychology. African history becomes more complex, more interesting, and more truthful when scholars stop attributing "advances" to Caucasoid genes and "primitiveness" to Negro genes. But anti-racism has not all been beneficial. A generation grew up drawing strange inferences from it. Since racism is "bad" politically and scientifically, and pro-Hamitic historical theories usually have been associated with racism, Hamites themselves are "bad" or unsavory or one should oppose any hypothesis which credits them with an important role in anything. Such an inference is a non sequitur and one which Greenberg never intended or supported. Is this prejudice immediately ascertainable; can its presence be easily shown, particularly among younger scholars? I believe this point is true but hard to test, particularly because I think it lies among the deep-seated attitudes an Africanist acquires in general training[...] Anti-racism, which has led to silly anti-Hamitism, finally led to falsehood when Ehret set out to restrict the role of the Cushites in eastern African history because they were a kind of Hamite. Yet the mapped distribution of the Cushites from central Egypt (near the Wadi Hammamat as Ababda Beja) to central Tanzania (near Dodoma, as Qwadza or Ngomvia) covers 35 degrees of latitude, or more than half of the north-south dimension of the African continent, halfway down the Cape to Cairo road. The great chain of Cushitic languages nearly equals that of Bantu in length, if not east-west width, but it contains greater internal diversity; differences between varieties are much greater, although the number of dialects and closely related languages are much fewer. Older than the Bantu chain, it is essentially continuous, which means that the whole geographical area it covers was occupied before more recent events created gaps. This is no early isolated jolt from southern Ethiopia, as Ehret portrays it, but one of the most important early population movements in African history.