Panel # 6A:
"Early Ethnogenesis and Regional Contexts"
The C-Group and the Dinka
Richard Lobban
Anthropology
Rhode Island College
In the expanding field of ethnoarchaeology, researchers seek to find parallels
between existing ethnic groups with groups that are known in the archaeological
record. Naturally care must be taken that does not imply that there
is an actual identity between groups that lived in different times and places.
At the same time, continuities in the region, in patterns of ethnogenesis,
technology, economics, and in material culture can yield a productive advance
in analysis. At the least this approach can create hypothetical practices,
and possible contexts that be subjected to further testing and inquiry.
Such is the case in this paper that will examine some of the archeological
evidence of the C-Group in Lower Nubia in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE
in comparison with ethnographic and historical evidence from the Nilotic
Dinka in the southern Sudan. The parallels are numerous in lifestyle,
perhaps belief systems, especially in their pastoral economies, material
culture and perhaps in funerary practices. This paper will present
such evidence and try to shed light on some of the issues of ethnogenesis
in the Nile Valley.
Abeed (Slaves)!: Slavery, the Slave Trade and its Transformation in Southern
Sudan (1650-1920).
Stephanie Beswick,
Department of History
Ball State University
Since the early modern period in Sudan the slaving
frontier has been moving southwards from Sinnar. Southern people, as military
and other slaves, formed the backbone of the Sinnar economy. Further south,
concomitantly in the kingdoms of Southern Sudan, among the Shilluk, Bari,
Mundari and the empire of the Azande indigenous forms of slavery, slave
raiding and a slave trade emerged. As Sinnar declined in power and the sultanate
of Dar Fur came to the fore, the Southern Sudanese slaving frontier shifted
southwards with the formation of the Fertit kingdoms of Ngulgule and Feroge
along with the introduction of incessant raids into the Bahr el-Ghazal by
the newly arrived West African Islamic Baggara. Some decades later, as the
Turco-Egyptians forcibly and violently colonized the whole of Sudan, the
result, in Southern Sudan, was a transformation of the political economies
of the Southern Sudanese kingdoms, the increased militarization and politicization
of the centrally located stateless Dinka confederation, and the ethnic balkanization
and restructurement of much of South Sudanese society.
Nubia, Corridor to Africa?
kharyssa rhodes
Department of Anthropology
University of Florida
Abstract: In this paper, I explore the theoretical and material evidence
in support of interaction between the ancient peoples of Nubia and their
contemporaries in, what is today, Uganda. Concentrating on the later periods
of Nubian history - specifically the Meroitic and Christian eras - I present
a critical discussion of past and current theories regarding contact between
the peoples of Nubia and the developing kingdoms of Bunyoro and Buganda.
Ultimately, this critique severs to place ancient Nubia within the larger
context of the Central African region, as well as within the broader theoretical
framework of African archaeology.
Where is Nubia? The Nubian Village as a Gendered Source of Cultural Authenticity
in Egypt
Elizabeth A. Smith
New York University
Department of Anthropology
This paper explores the nature of Nubia as an unclear border region split
between two nation-states, Sudan and Egypt, through examining tourism to
Egyptian Nubian villages. Nubia’s indeterminacy—an imprecisely defined
geographical region inundated by the construction of the High Dam whose population
was relocated in the 1960s—fuels most contemporary debates about Nubians’
belonging within the Egyptian nation. The paper explores the consequences
for Egyptian national identity when such a border region is made the center
of new geographies of international and domestic tourism to the idea of a
vanished homeland, pre-dam Old Nubia. Tourism itineraries include both
contemporary Nubian villages in Aswan and ethnographic museum recreations
of Old Nubia village life. Such travel circuits may both inscribe and
exceed the boundaries of the modern nation-state, reinforcing its borders
while referring to something beyond them. Nubian women, specifically
village women, bear a double burden as both the contested site of tradition
and nostalgia to be preserved on the one hand, and on the other, the site
of cultural loss and a target of reform.