In Praise of the Ancestors: Names, Identity, and Memory in Africa and the Americas

In Praise of the Ancestors is a revisionist interpretation of early colonial accounts that reveal incongruities in accepted knowledge about three Native groups. Susan Elizabeth Ramírez reevaluates three case studies of oral traditions using positional inheritance, which contributes to collective memories and group identity. She examines the Kazembes in central Africa, the Iroquois Confederation, and the Andeans, questioning colonial narratives and documenting the use of an alternative system of memory perpetuation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 23 May 2022
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Apart from collective memories of lived experiences, a significant portion of the modern world's historical understanding derives from written sources preserved in the archives worldwide. Some scholars in the not-so-distant past have even described unlettered civilizations as "peoples without history."
In Praise of the Ancestors is a revisionist interpretation of early colonial accounts that unveil inconsistencies in the commonly accepted knowledge about three Native groups.
Susan Elizabeth Ramírez reevaluates three case studies of oral traditions using positional inheritance, a system wherein names and titles are inherited from one generation to another and thus contribute to the formation of collective memories and a group identity. Ramírez begins by examining positional inheritance and perpetual kinship among the Kazembes in central Africa from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Next, her analysis shifts to the Native groups of the Iroquois Confederation and their practice of using names to commemorate remarkable leaders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, Ramírez surveys naming practices of the Andeans, based on sixteenth-century manuscript sources and later testimonies found in Spanish and Andean archives, questioning colonial narratives by documenting the use of this alternative system of memory perpetuation, which was initially unrecognized by the Spaniards.
In the course of reexamining the histories of Native peoples on three continents, Ramírez addresses a broader issue: namely, understanding the nature of knowledge as fundamental to understanding and evaluating the knowledge itself.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496230256